Inconsistencies In Ontologies Research Articles

Amartya Sen as a Neoclassical Economist

Amartya Sen is often described as an insightful critic of mainstream economics, and in particular, his work in development economics, alongside the construction of the capabilities approach, has been associated with endeavors to revisit both the theory and practice of the discipline. Despite his in-depth criticisms of certain aspects of mainstream economics, Sen’s extensive use of formal methods is suggestive of an ontological tension, one identified by Thorstein Veblen when commenting on some of his contemporaries and originally introducing the term “neoclassical.” Veblen argued that the work of these economists involved both an implicit recognition of a causal processual social ontology he associated with modern, thoroughly evolutionary, approaches and a commitment to a taxonomic conception of science—the latter relying on a set of methods that presupposed an associationist ontology of event regularities. For Veblen, the adherence to taxonomic methods was the classical feature of their work, and the commitment to an evolutionary viewpoint was the neo aspect. This article argues that the same tension runs through Sen’s contributions and that he is neoclassical in this specifically Veblenian sense. The assessment of the ontological inconsistencies in Sen’s work is shown to shed light on its reception within the economics academy.

Resource entanglement and indeterminacy: Advancing the service-dominant logic through the philosophy of Karen Barad

Resources are central to value creation processes. Hence, marketing and service research rely heavily on conceptualisations of resources and resource integration for theory building efforts. One of the most widely accepted marketing lenses on resources and resource integration is the service-dominant (S-D) logic. Depicting resources as becoming and contextual, S-D logic argues that their usefulness co-depends on other resources. Some assumptions of S-D logic have been challenged particularly its dichotomous categorisation of operand and operant resources. To inform ongoing S-D logic theorising, our article problematises the multiple and contradictory ontological views upon resources and resource integration present within S-D logic. Moving beyond critique, we propose concrete means for reconciling these contradictions. Seeing a parallel between S-D logic’s ontological inconsistencies and past ontological disagreements in the philosophy of science, we draw on the philosophical perspective of Karen Barad to develop a consistent onto-epistemological foundation for conceptualising the becoming nature of resources in S-D logic. The theory adaptation we perform enhances the applicability and explanatory capacity of S-D logic, while also offering a more robust and rigorous foundation for marketing and service research at large and giving managers new means to make sense of co-dependent resource phenomena.

A new framework for systematic analysis and classification of inconsistencies in multi-viewpoint ontologies

A new framework for systematic analysis and classification of inconsistencies in multi-viewpoint ontologies

Handling inconsistency in partially preordered ontologies: the Elect method

Abstract We focus on the problem of handling inconsistency in lightweight ontologies. We assume that the terminological knowledge base (TBox) is specified in DL-Lite and that the set of assertional facts (ABox) is partially preordered and may be inconsistent with respect to the TBox. One of the main contributions of this paper is the provision of an efficient and safe method, called Elect, to restore the consistency of the ABox with respect to the TBox. In the case where the assertional base is flat (i.e. no priorities are associated with the ABox) or totally preordered, we show that our method collapses with the well-known intersection ABox repair semantics and the non-defeated semantics, respectively. The semantic justification of the Elect method is obtained by first viewing a partially preordered ABox as a family of totally preordered ABoxes and then applying non-defeated inference to each of the totally preordered ABoxes. We introduce the notion of elected assertions which allows us to provide an equivalent characterization of the Elect method without explicitly generating all the totally preordered ABoxes. We show that computing the set of elected assertions is done in polynomial time with respect to the size of the ABox. The second part of the paper discusses how to go beyond the Elect method. In particular, we discuss to what extent the Elect method can be generalized to description logics that are more expressive than DL-Lite.

A New Framework for Systematic Analysis and Classification of Inconsistencies in Multi-Viewpoint Ontologies

Plurality of beliefs and theories in different knowledge domains calls for modelling multi-viewpoint ontologies and knowledge organization systems (KOS). A generic theoretical approach recently proposed for heterogeneity representation in KOS was linking each ontological statement to a specific validity scope to determine a set of conditions under which the statement is valid. However, the practical applicability of this approach has yet to be empirically assessed. In addition, there is still a need to investigate the types of inconsistencies that might arise in multi-viewpoint ontologies as well as their possible causes. This study proposes a new framework for systematic analysis and classification of inconsistencies in multi-viewpoint ontologies. The framework is based on eight generic logical structures of ontological statements. To test the validity of the proposed framework, two ontologies from different knowledge domains were examined. We found that only three of the eight structures led to inconsistencies in both ontologies, while the other two structures were always present in logically consistent statements. The study has practical implications for building diversified and personalized knowledge systems.

A Tailor-made Data Quality Approach for Higher Educational Data

AbstractPurposeThis paper relates the definition of data quality procedures for knowledge organizations such as Higher Education Institutions. The main purpose is to present the flexible approach developed for monitoring the data quality of the European Tertiary Education Register (ETER) database, illustrating its functioning and highlighting the main challenges that still have to be faced in this domain.Design/methodology/approachThe proposed data quality methodology is based on two kinds of checks, one to assess the consistency of cross-sectional data and the other to evaluate the stability of multiannual data. This methodology has an operational and empirical orientation. This means that the proposed checks do not assume any theoretical distribution for the determination of the threshold parameters that identify potential outliers, inconsistencies, and errors in the data.FindingsWe show that the proposed cross-sectional checks and multiannual checks are helpful to identify outliers, extreme observations and to detect ontological inconsistencies not described in the available meta-data. For this reason, they may be a useful complement to integrate the processing of the available information.Research limitationsThe coverage of the study is limited to European Higher Education Institutions. The cross-sectional and multiannual checks are not yet completely integrated.Practical implicationsThe consideration of the quality of the available data and information is important to enhance data quality-aware empirical investigations, highlighting problems, and areas where to invest for improving the coverage and interoperability of data in future data collection initiatives.Originality/valueThe data-driven quality checks proposed in this paper may be useful as a reference for building and monitoring the data quality of new databases or of existing databases available for other countries or systems characterized by high heterogeneity and complexity of the units of analysis without relying on pre-specified theoretical distributions.

Rule-driven inconsistency resolution for knowledge graph generation rules

Knowledge graphs, which contain annotated descriptions of entities and their interrelations, are often generated using rules that apply semantic annotations to certain data sources. (Re)using ontology terms without adhering to the axioms defined by their ontologies results in inconsistencies in these graphs, affecting their quality. Methods and tools were proposed to detect and resolve inconsistencies, the root causes of which include rules and ontologies. However, these either require access to the complete knowledge graph, which is not always available in a time-constrained situation, or assume that only generation rules can be refined but not ontologies. In the past, we proposed a rule-driven method for detecting and resolving inconsistencies without complete knowledge graph access, but it requires a predefined set of refinements to the rules and does not guide users with respect to the order the rules should be inspected. We extend our previous work with a rule-driven method, called Resglass, that considers refinements for generation rules as well as ontologies. In this article, we describe Resglass, which includes a ranking to determine the order with which rules and ontology elements should be inspected, and its implementation. The ranking is evaluated by comparing the manual ranking of experts to our automatic ranking. The evaluation shows that our automatic ranking achieves an overlap of 80% with experts ranking, reducing this way the effort required during the resolution of inconsistencies in both rules and ontologies.

An Argumentation-Based Approach for Computing Inconsistency Degree in Possibilistic Lightweight Ontologies

Reasoning with inconsistent ontologies plays an important role in Semantic Web applications. An important feature of argument theory is that it is able to naturally handle inconsistencies in ontologies and allows a user to represent information in the form of an argument. In argumentation, given an inconsistent knowledge base, arguments compete to decide which are the accepted consequences. In this paper, we are interested in using the argumentation for the inconsistency degree of uncertain knowledge bases expressed in possibilistic DL-Lite (the key notion in reasoning from a possibilistic DL-Lite knowledge base) without going through the negative closure. In the present work, the terminological base is assumed to be fully certain and the uncertainty is only considered on the assertion based. We proved that it is coherent and feasible to use Dung’s abstract argumentation theory to compute the inconsistency degree and how argumentation semantics relate to the state of the art of handling inconsistency.

Ontology Modelling on Legal Document: Case Study : Legal Document of Indonesian Republic

Regulation representation and reasoning process of the regulation representation is an important thing for finding inconsistency in Indonesian Republic Regulation Document. Indonesia is a legal nation. The mean of Legal Nation is that nation using law to regulate the life of society, state, and the government. Indonesia has been using law to maintain it’s stability since it’s founded. An inconsistence in law has been found in Indonesian regulation document. In this paper,we proposed a method to represent a Indonesian Republic regulation in an ontology form for reasoning process. Ontology language that used in this paper is OWL. The purpose of this representation is to be able to do a reasoning process to find inconsistent regulations and do the process of finding concepts in regulations. After transforming Indonesian Republic regulation document into OWL ontology form and reasoning process of Indonesian Regulation ontology inconsistency has been found.

Ontology Alignment Repair Through 0-1 Programming

In order to solve the problem of lack of effective methods for ontology inconsistency, a user preferences-oriented ontology alignment repair model is proposed. This model uses 0-1 linear programming method to minimize the remove cost; the structure and source of ontology are used to measure the axiom of importance; Finally, by choosing the minimal conflict sets and the user preferences limit repair strategy, the purpose of eliminating inconsistency, reducing semantic loss and guaranteeing credibility is achieved. The experimental results show that this method can effectively solve the problem of ontology inconsistency, and the restored ontology is more suitable for user preferences than traditional methods.

Efficient management and storage of a multiversion OWL 2 DL domain ontology

AbstractOntology is the chief technology to model domain knowledge and fix its heterogeneity. Knowledge evolution is unavoidable in all fields, and ontology should reflect such an evolution while preserving its consistency. The access to an ontology evolution history is also a crucial need. Thereby, ontology versions should be stored efficiently. To address these requirements, some works focused only on managing ontology inconsistency. To this end, they adopted an a posteriori approach that checks inconsistency after its occurrence. Others have mainly focused on some ontology versioning aspects other than the storage and the consistency preservation issues. Specifically, the state of the art storage strategies perform well some typical queries at the cost of a high storage space. Strategies with low space overhead lose the main specificity of ontology: the knowledge semantics modelling. So, it is useful to address all these shortcomings. This paper presents an approach that allows generating consistent OWL 2 DL ontology versions in a priori way. It also proposes an efficient storage strategy that preserves the semantics aspect of ontology and performs well typical queries with a low storage space. A protégé plug‐in is developed to show the feasibility of the main ideas presented in this paper.

A Semantic Retrieval Model Based on Domain Ontology of Orchard Disease and Pests

Ontology-based semantic retrieval can im- prove the efficiency of information retrieval. This paper proposes a semantic retrieval model based on domain on- tology of orchard disease and pests. According to Forestry Thesaurus, we semi-automatically construct a domain on- tology and repair ontology inconsistency to ensure the ac- curacy and uniqueness of the domain knowledge. A concept similarity algorithm is proposed and applied to calculate sentence similarity. We present a synthetic sentence simi- larity algorithm, which is a combination of the traditional sentence similarity algorithm and the weighted sentence similarity algorithm. Compared with other related meth- ods through experiments, our retrieval model has higher accuracy in semantic retrieval.

Towards mentoring as feminist praxis in early childhood education and care in England

Following our contribution to a study of mentoring in seven European countries, we explored epistemological and ontological inconsistencies within mainstream mentoring systems and their regulated practice in England. We considered how feminist mentoring praxis can unsettle conceptualisations of mentoring relationships and challenge inequity in the early education systems and the practice of teaching young children. Predominantly female, early childhood educators suffer from low status in England, and their working lives may be controlled and policed through inequitable systems. On entering the workforce, trainees encounter a reductionist policy milieu where mentoring structures and normative assessment arrangements contribute to inequity. Mentors play pivotal roles in inducting trainees into their worlds of work with young children. Mentoring relationships can determine whether trainees accept the status quo. Principles derived from feminist praxis enable mentors to practise an ‘engaged pedagogy’, co-constructing knowledge, subverting hierarchies and contesting taken-for-granted aspects of policy and practice.

Affective Aporetics: Complementary Contradictions in the Interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche

In 1971, Wolfgang Müller-Lauter introduced his study of Nietzsche as an investigation into the history of modern nihilism in which “contradiction” forms the central thread of the argument. For Müller-Lauter, the interpretive task is not to demonstrate the overall coherence or incoherence of Nietzsche’s philosophy, but to examine Nietzsche’s “philosophy of contradiction.” Against those such as Karl Jaspers, Karl Löwith and Martin Heidegger, Müller-Lauter argued that contradiction is the foundation of Nietzsche’s thought, and not a problem to be corrected or cast aside for exegetical or political purposes. For Müller-Lauter, contradiction qua incompatibility (not just mere opposition) holds a key to Nietzsche’s affective vision of philosophy. Beginning with the relationship between will to power and eternal recurrence, in this paper I examine aspects of Müller-Lauter’s account of Nietzsche’s philosophy of contradiction specifically in relation to the counter-interpretations offered by two other German commentators of Nietzsche, Leo Strauss and Karl Löwith, in order to confirm Müller-Lauter’s suggestion that contradiction is indeed an operative engine of Nietzsche’s thought. Indeed contradiction is a key Nietzschean theme and an important dynamic of becoming which enables the subject to be revealed as a “multiplicity” (BGE §12) and as a “fiction” (KSA 12:9[91]). Following Müller-Lauter’s assertion that for Nietzsche the problem of nihilism is fundamentally synonymous with the struggle of contradiction experienced by will to power, this paper interprets Nietzsche’s philosophy of contradiction in terms of subjective, bodily life (rather than in terms of logical incoherences or ontological inconsistencies). Against the backdrop of nihilism, the “self” (and its related place holder the “subject”), I will argue, becomes the psycho-physiological battlespace for the struggle and articulation of “contradiction” in Nietzsche’s thought.

Inconsistent ontology revision based on ontology constructs

Assessing the quality of ontologies is important to reuse/integrate ontologies. In this paper, we propose an approach to revise ontology inconsistency by measuring the relevant ontology constructs such as semantic partitions, axiom fanouts per concept, minimal incoherence-preserving subsets, incoherence impact value per axiom and preferable revision weight per concept in the ontology being measured. We also propose several algorithms to compute the measurement values of these ontology constructs, which can be used to pinpoint and rank which axioms and concepts are most likely to cause the ontology inconsistency. Our approach can help determine which concepts should be preferentially modified and therefore enables automatic revision of ontology inconsistency in the context of a dynamic and evolving environment.

Base Revision for Ontology Debugging

Belief Revision deals with the problem of adding new information to a knowledge base in a consistent way. Ontology Debugging, on the other hand, aims to find the axioms in a terminological knowledge base which caused the base to become inconsistent. In this article, we propose a belief revision approach in order to find and repair inconsistencies in ontologies represented in some description logic (DL). As the usual belief revision operators cannot be directly applied to DLs, we propose new operators that can be used with more general logics and show that, in particular, they can be applied to the logics underlying OWL-DL and Lite.