Ontological Space Research Articles

The deep metaphysics of quantum gravity: The seventeenth century legacy and an alternative ontology beyond substantivalism and relationism

This essay presents an alternative to contemporary substantivalist and relationist interpretations of quantum gravity hypotheses by means of an historical comparison with the ontology of space in the seventeenth century. Utilizing differences in the spatial geometry between the foundational theory and the theory derived from the foundational, in conjunction with nominalism and platonism, it will be argued that there are crucial similarities between seventeenth century and contemporary theories of space, and that these similarities reveal a host of underlying conceptual issues that the substantival/relational dichotomy fails to distinguish.

Clinical modeling—A critical analysis

BackgroundModeling clinical processes (and their informational representation) is a prerequisite for optimally enabling and supporting high quality and safe care through information and communication technology and meaningful use of gathered information. ObjectivesThe paper investigates existing approaches to clinical modeling, thereby systematically analyzing the underlying principles, the consistency with and the integration opportunity to other existing or emerging projects, as well as the correctness of representing the reality of health and health services. MethodsThe analysis is performed using an architectural framework for modeling real-world systems. In addition, fundamental work on the representation of facts, relations, and processes in the clinical domain by ontologies is applied, thereby including the integration of advanced methodologies such as translational and system medicine. ResultsThe paper demonstrates fundamental weaknesses and different maturity as well as evolutionary potential in the approaches considered. It offers a development process starting with the business domain and its ontologies, continuing with the Reference Model-Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) related conceptual models in the ICT ontology space, the information and the computational view, and concluding with the implementation details represented as engineering and technology view, respectively. ConclusionThe existing approaches reflect at different levels the clinical domain, put the main focus on different phases of the development process instead of first establishing the real business process representation and therefore enable quite differently and partially limitedly the domain experts’ involvement.

Real Virtuality: Power and Simulation in the Age of Neoliberal Crisis

Departing from a discussion of transformations in the premises of managerial rationality and “managementality” as a pacemaker of the (post)modern social order, as it is steeped in economic crisis, the paper critiques and extends Baudrillard’s constructs of “simulation” and “hyperreality” to illuminate significant developments in the global culture complex of neoliberalization. With empirical illustrations of superfinancialization, transparency and surveillance, the paper explores converging patterns of how models of “neo-management” are created by and constructs new post-political and simulated social worlds. The paper concludes that a key feature of the contemporary “managementalities” that orchestrate and give rise to major models of the neoliberal culture complex, is their capacity for constructing new simulated, yet ontologically distinct, spaces that lie beyond the power of representation. We conceptualize this ontological space as “real virtuality”. The templates of neo-management not only constantly “conquer new land” and subsume it under simulated hyperrealities, they actively “create new lands” with differential ontological statuses of varying gravity.

Levels of Subjective Globalization: Ideologies, Imaginaries, Ontologies

AbstractThe subjective dimensions of globalization have not received even close to the level of attention that has been paid to the objective dimensions of global interchange and extension. Seeking to rectify this neglect, we argue that the subjective dimensions of globalization can be conceptualized in terms of three dimensions or levels: ideologies, imaginaries, and ontologies. The Occupy Movement in several global locations seeks to challenge global capitalism as the dominant system of economics. At the ideological level, activists connected to Occupy tend to engage in fierce contestation of the global structuring of greed, thus exhibiting clear signs of global rebellion. However, the terms of debate and critique tend to become increasingly uncontested as we go deeper into examining the dominant social imaginary and the ontologies of modern time and space that underpin this general sense of the global. Occupy is clearly an important variant of “justice globalism” that has inspired scores of young activists to protest against increasing inequality and the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny minority. Still, we suggest that this important alter-globalization movement often works within many of the same subjective frameworks and precepts as the market-globalist world that it criticizes.

Pragmatic leadership: A return to wisdom

AbstractTe Ao Māori, or the Māori world, locates Māori philosophy, ethics and knowledge (wisdom) in a central role, and is therefore foundational to Māori thinking and practice. In this article, we present an example of pragmatic leadership, using the epistemological and ontological space of kaupapa Māori, a perspective that represents practice guided by the wisdom of Te Ao Māori. To do so, we draw from narrative shared by 22 Māori practitioners involved in leadership roles in a wide range of organisations to illustrate key features of Māori leadership practice. We argue that this approach offers a unique contribution and deeper understanding to the contemporary and instrumental representation of pragmatic leadership. Such a perspective allows researchers to explore leadership practices, particularly those that may be heavily influenced by culturally specific behaviours. In regards to practitioners, it provides foundation for innovative leadership practices grounded on giving weight to more deeply contextualised processes and relations. The consequences are widespread not only for researchers and practitioners of leadership, but also for a perception of indigenous leadership that is true to the indigenous logics in which they are grounded and reflective of good practice.

Adversus Singularitates: The Ontology of Space–Time Singularities

I argue that there are no physical singularities in space–time. Singular space–time models do not belong to the ontology of the world, because of a simple reason: they are concepts, defective solutions of Einstein’s field equations. I discuss the actual implication of the so-called singularity theorems. In remarking the confusion and fog that emerge from the reification of singularities I hope to contribute to a better understanding of the possibilities and limits of the theory of general relativity.

Um estudo sobre a ontologia do espaço na obra de Martin Heidegger

Este artigo pretende contribuir com o estudo da ontologia do espaço na obra de Martin Heidegger. Para tanto, dentro das limitações deste trabalho, procuramos analisar os contornos da fenomenologia heideggeriana, apontando como o filósofo alemão pensa a sua filosofia enquanto uma alternativa à metafísica tradicional concebida na modernidade. O objetivo central, aqui, é pôr em discussão o sentido do homem enquanto ser-no-mundo, entendendo o espaço como uma categoria de análise de grande importância para o homem-no-mundo, para a sociedade e, portanto, para a ciência geográfica.
 
 Abstract
 
 A STUDY ON THE ONTOLOGY OF SPACE IN WORK OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER
 
 This article aims to contribute to the study of the ontology of space in the work of Martin Heidegger. To do so, within the limitations of this work, we analyze the characteristics of Heideggerian phenomenology, pointing out how the German philosopher thinks his philosophy as an alternative to traditional metaphysics conceived in modernity. The main objective here is to focus discussion on the meaning of man as being in the world, understanding space as a category of analysis of great importance to man-in-the-world, to society and, therefore, for science geographical.

Newton’s Neo-Platonic Ontology of Space

This paper investigates Newton’s ontology of space in order to determine its commitment, if any, to both Cambridge neo-Platonism, which posits an incorporeal basis for space, and substantivalism, which regards space as a form of substance or entity. A non-substantivalist interpretation of Newton’s theory has been famously championed by Howard Stein and Robert DiSalle, among others, while both Stein and the early work of J. E. McGuire have downplayed the influence of Cambridge neo-Platonism on various aspects of Newton’s own spatial hypotheses. Both of these assertions will be shown to be problematic on various grounds, with special emphasis placed on Stein’s influential case for a non-substantivalist reading. Our analysis will strive, nonetheless, to reveal the unique or forward-looking aspects of Newton’s approach, most notably, his critical assessment of substance ontologies, that help to distinguish his theory of space from his neo-Platonic contemporaries and predecessors.

Review of Gärtner-Brereton, Luke, The Ontology of Space in Biblical Hebrew Narrative: The Determinate Function of Narrative “Space” within the Biblical Hebrew Aesthetic (BibleWorld; Oakville, CT; Equinox, 2008).

Review of Gärtner-Brereton, Luke, The Ontology of Space in Biblical Hebrew Narrative: The Determinate Function of Narrative “Space” within the Biblical Hebrew Aesthetic (BibleWorld; Oakville, CT; Equinox, 2008).

Ontology of space in Claude Debussy's sheet music

Background. Debussy's sheet music is a unique phenomenon showing the transformation of musical spatial characteristics into a graphic equivalent. This paper suggests a new elementalist approach to studying the spatial properties of musical sound. This approach enables musicologists and performers to create a new interpretation of sheet music and to discover a new musical content in a score. Aim: to show techniques which C. Debussy used to fix spatial characteristics in the printed music and to show how the physical properties of space - namely mass, volume and density of sound - become the carriers of the artistic sense in C. Debussy's notation. Objectives: to show the technique of marking the sound mass; ways of decreasing the weight of sound; transformation of the mass of sound into the volume of sound and the different density of sound. Methods of study. We used a musicological analysis to reveal the techniques of sound articulation typical of C. Debussy. The new approach of musicological elementalism was used to study musical sound in terms of its spatial features, namely its mass, volume and density. Musicology adopted the elementalist approach from personal psychology. Scientists used it to study personal nature in terms of every individual component of a person's behaviour, from simple to composite. We continue this tendency and use this approach in this item. A comparative method was used to find out the distinctions between mass, volume and density of sound. The axiological approach and semantic approach were used to study the expressive properties of mass, volume and density in the artistic content.

Mundane reason, membership categorization practices and the everyday ontology of space and place in interview talk

In this article we aim to utilise and apply ethnomethodological and interactionist principles to the analysis of members’ situated accounts of regenerated urban space. With reference to previous empirical studies we apply membership categorization analysis and the concept of mundane reason to data gathered from situated street level interviews carried out as part of a programme of ethnographic research into the regenerated setting of Cardiff Bay. The article demonstrates that these data yield sociological insight into social actors’ interpretive and interactional reasoning in relation to the negotiation, navigation and comprehension of space and place. Through this work the patterned signatures of the urban interactional order can be identified. Furthermore, we illustrate the forms of emic rationality associated with the everyday and ubiquitous constitution of urban space as a meaningful, and thence cultural, milieu. It is our claim that an appreciation of these urban forms of reasoning is important in the ethnographic, sociological and geographical analysis of space and place.

Representation of learning space ontology with the semantic web technologies

The problem of creating the individual learning course in the open content type systems was analysed in this work. The approach of creating the didactical ontology on the basis of conceptual - thesial model analysis of objective sphere by semantic web - technologies was made. Provided methodology is the combination of independent subject areas in a single educational space

Newton, the Parts of Space, and the Holism of Spatial Ontology

This article investigates the problem of the identity of the parts of space in Newton’s natural philosophy, as well as the holistic or structuralist nature of Newton’s ontology of space. Additionally, this article relates the lessons reached in this historical and philosophical investigation to analogous debates in contemporary space-time ontology. While previous contributions, by Nerlich, Huggett, and others, have proven to be informative in evaluating Newton’s claims, it will be argued that the underlying goals of Newton’s views have largely eluded prior analysis and that Newton’s approach is similar, and lends support, to several current structuralist trends in the conception of space-time ontology.

Computational Biology and the Limits of Shared Vision

Several studies have focused on the social sharing of visual practices as constitutive of evidence within a domain, while there has been relatively less attention paid to points where the social sharing of practices breaks down, or is resisted. This article argues that a study of both types of cases is necessary in order to gain a better perspective on social sharing of practices, and on what other factors this sharing is dependent upon. The article presents the case of currently emerging inter-disciplinary visual practices in the domain of computational biology, where the sharing of visual practices would be beneficial to the collaborations necessary for the research. Computational biology includes sub-domains where visual practices are coming to be shared across disciplines, and those where this is not occurring, and where the practices of others are resisted. A significant point of difference between these sub-domains is between visualizations that render the output of simulations and those which are images taken during observations using the techniques of microscopy. A crossing over, compromise or sharing of practices relating to these different sub-domains is difficult and often resisted. This resistance needs to be contextualised in a far richer account of the relations between the visual artifacts, the scientists who use them within disciplinary domains, the theoretical and instrumentational outlook of the disciplines in question, and that towards which the science is directed, its domain of study. Social practices alone are not sufficient to account for the shaping of evidence. The philosophy of Merleau-Ponty is introduced as providing an alternative framework for thinking of the complex inter-relations between all of these factors. This philosophy enables us to think of the inter-constitutive relations between these different factors, which ultimately define an epistemological and ontological space in which the object of study itself has an active constitutive role, and in which the scientist as person and perceiving body within a knowledge domain is also constituted.

Review of Luke Gärtner-Brereton, The Ontology of Space in Biblical Hebrew Narrative: The Determinate Function of Narrative 'Space' within the Biblical Hebrew Aesthetic

Deane Galbraith reviews Luke Gartner-Brereton, The Ontology of Space in Biblical Hebrew Narrative: The Determinate Function of Narrative 'Space' within the Biblical Hebrew Aesthetic (London: Equinox, 2008).

Challenging the ontological space of the doctoral dissertation and disputation

This is the postprint version of the article published in Nordic Studies in Education. You can find the published article via Idunn.no (subscription): http://www.idunn.no/ts/np

Intra-vehicular verification and control: a two-pronged approach

Modern vehicles are equipped with hundreds of embedded networked components with computational, sensory and actuation powers. Reliable functioning and interaction of these components are vital for the safety of the vehicle and its passengers. The authors present an architecture that deals with the intra-vehicular network at both component and system levels. At the component level, the technique formally verifies compatibility of each component with the rest of the system. At the system level, the authors provide means to define overall behavior by using first-order logic rules in an ontological space. Overall, they eliminate the hazards associated with integrating heterogeneous components in a car network domain and enable a knowledgeable user to define network behavior easily.

Towards the right formulation of a technical problem

Due to the growing interest in innovation issues, support for suitable problem definition is increasingly important and desired, focusing on the identification of the right direction of work without getting lost on useless roads [1]. This work presents a set of rules, conceived by the authors to better define the right reformulation of the initial problem. Most of the philosophical reflections about the concept used to build this procedure are presented. Particular attention is focused on the definition of the exact zone of the critical element to work on, in a specific and precise instant of time. Time and space ontologies, and an historical excursus about operative time, are accompanied by many technical examples in order to provide a deep awareness about classical problem solving steps, already present in ARIZ 85C but used in a different way.

The Child's Brain: Applications of the Internet Brain Volume Database (IBVD)

Event Abstract Back to Event The Child's Brain: Applications of the Internet Brain Volume Database (IBVD) Christian Haselgrove1*, Steven Hodge1, Jean Frazier1 and David Kennedy1 1 University of Massachusetts Medical School, Department of Psychiatry, United States The Internet Brain Volume Database (IBVD, http://www.cma.mgh.harvard.edu/ibvd) is a web-based database designed to capture volumetric observations of neuroanatomic structures from the literature. IBVD was the first web site dedicated to exposing, sharing, and integrating brain volume observations, and does so across species and disease. The current objective is to capture retrospective data in order to finalize a proof of concept for the site to enable migration of the concept to a long term, sustainable solution. Every week, numerous publications appear that include neuroanatomic volumetric observations; about one third of these are applications in the child and adolescent age groups, and the total magnitude of literature for particular neuroanatomic structures is quite variable. The harvesting of published information is, at the moment, very labor intensive; thus initial efforts are concentrated on structures and disorders that have the maximum number of published observations. IBVD is a web application implemented in PHP on top of a PostgreSQL database. Data entry statistics (as of April, 2011) include 631 publications, 1158 subject groups, 9473 group volume entries, almost 300 clinical diagnoses, 1939 individuals, 10215 individual structural volume entries, and over 200 brain structures. The use of a structured vocabulary is used in order to maximize the interoperability of this site with other data resources. To date, the anatomic hierarchy supported by IBVD subtends a specific spatial scale of the complete possible neuroanatomic ontology space. Structures from the whole brain to major subdivisions (e.g. cerebrum) to components of these major regions (e.g. cerebral cortex, white matter) to subcomponents within these regions (e.g. precentral gyrus) are mapped into this ontology. Many of these structures have links to other ontological systems, and are organized through the NeuroLex system. IBVD is currently being used for quick analyses of pediatric studies. Results of published studies may be quickly viewed in the context of existing literature as a whole (see figure), and a similar visualization is done offline for studies in progress. Applications of the meta-analysis facilitated by the database are many-fold. In the pediatric populations, it is highly informative to study the extent to which volumetric patterns observed in the adult are also seen in the younger age groups: What age does the finding of differing rates of growth between gray and white matter structures first appear? At what age does do the findings of gender dimorphism appear? Is the adult asymmetric lateralization of the hippocampus also seen in children? How prevalent in the literature is the finding of limbic volumetric alterations in children with pediatric bipolar disorder? Figure 1 Keywords: Infrastructural and portal services Conference: 4th INCF Congress of Neuroinformatics, Boston, United States, 4 Sep - 6 Sep, 2011. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Infrastructural and portal services Citation: Haselgrove C, Hodge S, Frazier J and Kennedy D (2011). The Child's Brain: Applications of the Internet Brain Volume Database (IBVD). Front. Neuroinform. Conference Abstract: 4th INCF Congress of Neuroinformatics. doi: 10.3389/conf.fninf.2011.08.00105 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 17 Oct 2011; Published Online: 19 Oct 2011. * Correspondence: Dr. Christian Haselgrove, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Department of Psychiatry, Worcester, United States, christian.haselgrove@umassmed.edu Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Christian Haselgrove Steven Hodge Jean Frazier David Kennedy Google Christian Haselgrove Steven Hodge Jean Frazier David Kennedy Google Scholar Christian Haselgrove Steven Hodge Jean Frazier David Kennedy PubMed Christian Haselgrove Steven Hodge Jean Frazier David Kennedy Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

An alternative realization of 't Hooft's quantum determinism

We present an alternative to 't Hooft's mechanism relating a deterministic system to a 1D quantum oscillator. We argue that it is possible to map 't Hooft's ontological space onto an irreducible representation of a 2D isotropic oscillator. A direct group contraction procedure can then be applied to achieve the correspondence.