Ontological Theory Research Articles

Guidelines for Designing Visual Ontologies to Support Knowledge Identification

Organizations often provide workers with knowledge management systems to help them obtain knowledge they need. A significant constraint on the effectiveness of such systems is that they assume workers know what knowledge they need (they know what they don't know) when, in fact, they often do not know what knowledge they need (they don't know what they don't know). A way to overcome this problem is to use visual ontologies to help users learn relevant concepts and relationships in the knowledge domain, enabling them to search the knowledge base in a more educated manner. However, no guidelines exist for designing such ontologies. To fill this gap, we draw on theories of philosophical ontology and cognition to propose guidelines for designing visual ontologies for knowledge identification. We conducted three experiments to compare the effectiveness of guided ontologies, visual ontologies that followed our guidelines, to unguided ontologies, visual ontologies that violated our guidelines. We found that subjects performed considerably better with the guided ontologies, and that subjects could perceive the benefits of using guided ontologies, at least in some circumstances. On the basis of these results, we conclude that the way visual ontologies are presented makes a difference in knowledge identification and that theories of philosophical ontology and cognition can guide the construction of more effective visual representations. Furthermore, we propose that the principles we used to create the guided visual ontologies can be generalized for other cases where visual models are used to inform users about application domains.

Do Ontological Deficiencies in Modeling Grammars Matter?

Conceptual modeling grammars are a fundamental means for specifying information systems requirements. However, the actual usage of these grammars is only poorly understood. In particular, little is known about how properties of these grammars inform usage beliefs such as usefulness and ease of use. In this paper, we use an ontological theory to describe conceptual modeling grammars in terms of their ontological deficiencies, and formulate two propositions in regard to how these ontological deficiencies influence primary usage beliefs. Using BPMN as an example modeling grammar, we surveyed 528 modeling practitioners to test the theorized relationships. Our results show that users of conceptual modeling grammars perceive ontological deficiencies to exist, and that these deficiency perceptions are negatively associated with usefulness and ease of use of these grammars. With our research, we provide empirical evidence in support of the predictions of the ontological theory of modeling grammar expressiveness, and we identify previously unexplored links between conceptual modeling grammars and grammar usage beliefs. This work implies for practice a much closer coupling of the act of (re-)designing modeling grammars with usage-related success metrics.

A Unified Communication Framework for Intelligent Integrated CNC on the Shop Floor

The CNC controller is the termination executor located at the end of the whole manufacturing chain. The current CNC is relatively isolated from the upper planning and manufacturing modules owing to the older data interface ISO 6983. Furthermore, lack of effective integration of heterogeneous information at the distributed automation environment is becoming increasingly evident. As a result, the development of CNC's intelligence and integration is heavily restrained. In this paper, a unified communication framework is proposed, which takes STEP-NC as the information input from CAD/CAPP/CAM and adopts the real-time industrial Ethernet fieldbus for controlling and monitoring at the device level. Based on this framework, a knowledge base modeling approach using ontology theory is addressed. The validation of combining this communication framework with the open and intelligent CNC is also discussed in the end.

OBML – Ontologies in Biomedicine and Life Sciences

The OBML 2010 workshop, held at the University of Mannheim on September 9-10, 2010, is the 2nd in a series of meetings organized by the Working Group “Ontologies in Biomedicine and Life Sciences” of the German Society of Computer Science (GI) and the German Society of Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (GMDS). Integrating, processing and applying the rapidly expanding information generated in the life sciences — from public health to clinical care and molecular biology — is one of the most challenging problems that research in these fields is facing today. As the amounts of experimental data, clinical information and scientific knowledge increase, there is a growing need to promote interoperability of these resources, support formal analyses, and to pre-process knowledge for further use in problem solving and hypothesis formulation.The OBML workshop series pursues the aim of gathering scientists who research topics related to life science ontologies, to exchange ideas, discuss new results and establish relationships. The OBML group promotes the collaboration between ontologists, computer scientists, bio-informaticians and applied logicians, as well as the cooperation with physicians, biologists, biochemists and biometricians, and supports the establishment of this new discipline in research and teaching. Research topics of OBML 2010 included medical informatics, Semantic Web applications, formal ontology, bio-ontologies, knowledge representation as well as the wide range of applications of biomedical ontologies to science and medicine. A total of 14 papers were presented, and from these we selected four manuscripts for inclusion in this special issue.An interdisciplinary audience from all areas related to biomedical ontologies attended OBML 2010. In the future, OBML will continue as an annual meeting that aims to bridge the gap between theory and application of ontologies in the life sciences. The next event emphasizes the special topic of the ontology of phenotypes, in Berlin, Germany on October 6-7, 2011.

The Beauty of a Social Problem (e.g. unemployment)

In his new book on volume one of Capital, Fredric Jameson remarks that in post-war 1950s and 1960s, Marx's idea that capitalism would eventually begin to polarize society into a and smaller group of capitalists and ever larger percentage of poor object of much mockery (Representing 71). Today, he points out, no one's laughing. And, in fact, laughter should, if we had been paying attention, have begun to fade as early as 1977 when (relative) income equality that had prevailed since end of war began turning into stunning rise in inequality that has prevailed ever since. In 1984, for example, when Jameson published, Postmodernism: Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, top 10% of wage-earners in US earned about 37% of all income (up from about 34% in 1977 and including gains); now figure is more like 50%. (1) So insofar as our interest is in periodizing (then) postmodernism, thing to note is that its consolidation into a more or less identifiable set of theoretical commitments and artistic practices is more a phenomenon of years since mid-'70s (economists sometimes call it period of Washington Consensus) than of ones before (which they sometimes call period of Treaty of Detroit). (2) And second is that if, with advantage of hindsight, we think about not only in relation to what Jameson in 1984 called multinational capital (Postmodernism 3) but, more specifically, in relation to rise in inequality that has accompanied what today we more usually call neoliberalism, we can perhaps say something useful about as a theory of knowledge, as a theory of ontology of work of art, and most obviously, as a theory of social organization And finally, useful thing I want to say is that essence of postmodern has been precisely its theorization of equality, by which I mean its disarticulation of difference from inequality and, more generally, from conflict and contradiction. Of course, there's an important sense in which a pre-77, post-77 distinction is arbitrary. On one hand, it's not insignificant that The Postmodern Condition was published in 1979 or that art critic Douglas Crimp first found it useful to employ term postmodernism (Crimp 108) in 1979 revision of his catalog essay to groundbreaking Pictures show of 1977 or that if you produce a Google ngram for postmodern, word doesn't really get off ground until 1978. On other hand, many of crucial practices, positions, and arguments--ranging from critique of author and autonomy of work of art to invention of human and fetishization of education as key to social justice (3)--were put into place in more immediate post-war period. My idea in insisting on late '70s, then, is not so much to establish a serious discontinuity between before and after (much less to invoke a kind of nostalgia for distinctive injustices of affluent society) as it is to suggest that only from standpoint of developments that became visible in late '70s can we see which of inventions of post-War period really mattered. And point of invoking rise of economic inequality (rather than, say, mainstreaming of affirmative action in 1978 (4) or quadrupling of number of creative writing programs between 1975 and 1984 (5) or rise of legal immigration from 385,000 in 1975 to 1,826,000 in 1991 (6)) is that it helps us to see what new positions and practices turned out to do. To put point as teleologically as possible, in helping us see what was for, it helps us see what was, and is. We can get at same phenomenon analytically rather than chronologically by starting not with economic data but with a relatively straight-forward and authoritative statement of postmodern aesthetics, in effect, an account of what Crimp and others meant when they started to use the term postmodernism. …

André Bazin: Film as Social Documentary

Traditionally in Film Studies, the idea of cinema being able to put the truth on screen has been associated with one particular film theorist, namely Andre Bazin. However, only 6% of Bazin’s almost 2600 articles has been republished in anthologies or edited essay collections and reading the remaining 94% of these writings (which to date basically remains widely unread) makes it clear that Bazin was not so naive. This paper focuses on an essay from 1947, one of Bazin's first and most important, Tout film est un documentaire social [Every Film is a Social Documentary]. It suggests that fiction films can tell the truth, but mainly in the way that dreams do, by revealing what people really think, or their collective unconsciousness, regardless of their conscious awareness. What is this truth which is told by any fiction film? How can one reconcile this theoretical perspective with Bazinian ontological theory of cinema in general? This article seeks to answer these questions by means of an in-depth analysis of that essay and of a wide range of examples taken from other, mostly unknown writings by Bazin.

On Seeing: Remarks on Metzger’s Laws of Seeing

Nowadays cognitive science often views sensorial presentations and mental presentations as mutually exclusive, and they are also given separate treatment by neurophysiologists and by cognitive scientists, and some phenomena (like anomalous surfaces or various types of imagery) are reduced to either the former or the latter. Since no adequate methods for its investigation have been developed, the level of perceptual experiences analysed by Gestaltists and magnificently illustrated by Metzger in his Laws of Seeing remains unexplored. Starting from Metzger’s analyses the paper deals with the question of the theoretical value of experimental phenomenology to the theory of knowledge and ontology.

Curves in Gödel-Space: Towards a Structuralist Ontology of Mathematical Signs

I propose an account of the metaphysics of the expressions of a mathematical language which brings together the structuralist construal of a mathematical object as a place in a structure, the semantic notion of indexicality and Kit Fine's ontological theory of qua objects. By contrasting this indexical qua objects account with several other accounts of the metaphysics of mathematical expressions, I show that it does justice both to the abstractness that mathematical expressions have because they are mathematical objects and to the element of concreteness that they have because they are also used as signs. In a concluding section, I comment on the pragmatic element that has entered ontology by way of the notion of indexicality and use it to give an answer to a question Stewart Shapiro has recently posed about the status of meta-mathematics in the structuralist philosophy of mathematics.

Models of Agriculture Risk Management with Agriculture Ontology

with economic globalization and market-oriented agricultural economy, the impact factors of agricultural risks become more complicated. As a variety of factors intertwine together, the traditional Expert System is difficult to identify and manage agricultural risks, which greatly hampers the process of agricultural risk management. To overcome this problem, we introduce the ontology theory. By constructing agricultural risk ontology and agricultural risk strategy ontology, we can resolve the problem of agricultural risk's description and identification, and improve the efficiency and reliability of agricultural risk management. In this paper, we introduce the domain ontology theory to the field of agricultural risk management, and describe the basic process of the domain ontology-based agricultural risk management. And then, we propose a framework of ontology-based agricultural risk management and specifically introduce each module in the framework. Meanwhile, based on the method of building ontology, this article constructs the basic frame of the agricultural risk ontology. Finally, to take the drought risk for example, the paper analyses the implementation process and technologies of the domain ontology-based agricultural risk management.

Conceptual modeling of causal map: Object oriented causal map

This study has been started from question “Is there a methodology that can make causal map comprised of causality as a database by using conceptual modeling method?” In this research, causal map is proposed to represent causal relation by using conceptual modeling method. Therefore, we formalize causality as a cognitive rule to allow us to control changes in the decision making environment. Such causality is embedded in the real world (application domain). And, user (decision maker) use to represent set of causality which decision-makers have retrieved from the set of knowledge or experiences in application domain. Such set of causality that decision-makers possess in their know–how and short (long) term memory are usually formalized by causal map. It is verified for users whether this causal map is helpful in solving their problems. By extending the basis of conceptual modeling theory (ontology theory, classification theory, decomposition theory, and semantic network theory), we introduce a concept of causal entity diagram and address why causal map is needed to analyze a specific domain knowledge for given decision problem solving. Finally, object oriented causal map (O2CM) were employed to verify usefulness of causal map for user (decision maker) in this study.

Affordance-based categorization of road network data using a grounded theory of channel networks

We propose a grounded ontological theory of channel networks to categorize features, such as junctions, in road network databases. The theory is grounded, because its primitives can be given an unambiguous interpretation into directly observable qualities of physical road networks, such as supported movements and their medium, connectedness of such media, and turnoff restrictions. The theory provides a very general approach to automatically annotate and integrate road network data from heterogeneous sources, because it rests on application-independent observation principles. We suggest that road network categories such as junctions and roads are based on locomotion affordances. Road network databases can be mapped into our channel network theory, so that instances of roads and junctions can be automatically categorized or checked for consistency by what they afford. In this paper, we introduce affordance-based definitions of a road network and a junction, and show that the definition of latter is satisfied by some of the most common junction types.

Towards an ontological theory of wellness: a discussion of conceptual foundations and implications for nursing

Towards an ontological theory of wellness: a discussion of conceptual foundations and implications for nursing

Anticipation and future vision in Nicolai Hartmann's ontology

PurposeThis article aims to explore anticipation from an ontological point of view and to analyze in particular some of Nicolai Hartmann's ideas.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents a conceptual analysis of an ontological theory of anticipation.FindingsAnalyzing philosophical problems related to “futures” and “anticipation”, to the framework of modal categories, and connecting Hartmann with Ludwig von Bertalanffy and comparing the outcome with some Artistotelian theses, offers a philosophical perspective on futures studies.Research limitations/implicationsThe “human” phenomenon of anticipation will be defined as possibly the only form of authentic anticipation, interpreted as a teleological act.Originality/valueThe result is obtained through the distinction, articulated for each level of reality, among different kinds of determination.

Book Review: The Ethics of Computer Games by Miguel Sicart

This review describes The Ethics of Computer Games, a recent academic release by Miguel Sicart. Sicart uses a philosophical framework of various ethical and ontological theories to analyze how different games and game designs invoke or ignore the moral virtues of the culture in which they exist. According to Sicart, the most ethical games are those which take into account the complex subjective role of the player and the game community, and inscribe in the gameplay a kind of ethical system that either cultivates "virtuous" exploration or challenges the player to come to a specific ethical conclusion based on careful reflection.

Representing Classes of Things and Properties in General in Conceptual Modelling

How classes of things and properties in general should be represented in conceptual models is a fundamental issue. For example, proponents of object-role modelling argue that no distinction should be made between the two constructs, whereas proponents of entity-relationship modelling argue the distinction is important but provide ambiguous guidelines about how the distinction should be made. In this paper, the authors use ontological theory and cognition theory to provide guidelines about how classification should be represented in conceptual models. The authors experimented to test whether clearly distinguishing between classes of things and properties in general enabled users of conceptual models to better understand a domain. They describe a cognitive processing study that examined whether clearly distinguishing between classes of things and properties in general impacts the cognitive behaviours of the users. The results support the use of ontologically sound representations of classes of things and properties in conceptual modelling.

Conceptual Modeling: the Linguistic Approach

After more than thirty years of its first introduction, conceptual modeling remains an important research field, which has been recently addressed by the literature on semantic interoperability in its various forms (model integration, service interoperability, knowledge harmonization, taxonomy alignment), domain engineering and the creation of conceptual models through Natural Language Processing (NLP), to name a few. In the database conceptual design, the designer must learn the language used in the Universe of Discourse (UoD) to be modeled, along with its underlying concepts, and then represent such concepts in a modeling language. Thus, the conceptual modeling process can be seen as a translation. For the resulting model to be both detailed and unambiguous, the designer must represent the UoD in a generative language which constructs can convey the same concepts represented in the respective natural language. For the whole process to be effective, we argue that the adoption of modeling languages and methodologies that are based on well-founded ontological theories is required. We propose the use of a linguistic approach for conceptual modeling from natural language texts, and illustrate how it may be applied using the well-founded modeling language OntoUML.

Relational and Substantival Ontologies, and the Nature and the Role of Primitives in Ontological Theories

Several metaphysical debates have typically been modeled as oppositions between a relationist approach and a substantivalist approach. Such debates include the Bundle Theory and the Substratum Theory about ordinary material objects, the Bundle (Humean) Theory and the Substance (Cartesian) Theory of the Self, and Relationism and Substantivalism about time. In all three debates, the substantivalist side typically insists that in order to provide a good treatment of the subject-matter of the theory (time, Self, material objects), it is necessary to postulate the existence of a certain kind of substance, while the other side, the relationist one, characteristically feels that this is an unnecessary expense and that one can get the job done in an ontologically cheaper way just with inter-related properties or events. In this paper I shall defend the view that there is much less of a disagreement between relational ontologies and substantival ontologies than it is usually thought. I believe that, when carefully examined, the two sides of the debate are not that different from each other, in all three cases of pairs of views mentioned above. As we will see, both the relational side and the substantival side work in the same way, suffer from and answer the same objections, and are structurally extremely similar. It will be an important question—one that I shall discuss in detail, and that is indeed the main point of interest for me in this paper—whether this means that the two sides of the debate are somehow ‘equivalent’ or not, and what ‘equivalent’ could mean.

Towards an ontological theory of substance intolerance and hypersensitivity

A proper ontological treatment of intolerance—including hypersensitivity—to various substances is critical to patient care and research. However, existing methods and standards for documenting these conditions have flaws that inhibit these goals, especially translational research that bridges the two activities. In response, I outline a realist approach to the ontology of substance intolerance, including hypersensitivity conditions. I defend a view of these conditions as a subtype of disease. Specifically, a substance intolerance is a disease whose pathological process(es) are realized upon exposure to a quantity of substance of a particular type, and this quantity would normally not cause the realization of the pathological process(es). To develop this theory, it was necessary to build pieces of a theory of pathological processes. Overall, however, the framework of the Ontology for General Medical Science (which uses Basic Formal Ontology as its uppermost level) was a more-than-adequate foundation on which to build the theory.

The Future of Post‐Human Knowledge: A Preface to a New Theory of Methodology and Ontology

The Future of Post‐Human Knowledge: A Preface to a New Theory of Methodology and Ontology

Interoperability and ontology for AS-Interface bus

This article deals with interoperability problem and ontologies. Main aim is connection an industrial fielbus AS-Interface with other systems. Two cases are described - connection with a higher level system and with a fieldbus on the similar level. Basic principles to solve the interoperability problem in heterogenous systems are defined. The ontology theory, which is used as a mean to reach the interoperability issue, is presented.