Ontology Mediation Research Articles

Christ the Mediator and Head of Angels in Calvin's Theology

AbstractThough Calvin is averse to theological speculation, he is the first to claim that Christ is Mediator and Head of Angels. This often‐overlooked office is present consistently throughout the various editions of the Institutes and can be found in his treatises, commentaries, catechism, and various sermons. This paper argues that Christ's mediation of angels is a form of ontological mediation that serves as the logical foundation for his redemptive mediation of the Elect. Sin is an intensification of a preexisting problem that requires the Son to be the medius and Mediator between God and creation because of his unique position in the Trinitarian taxis as the begotten one. This overlooked office places Calvin's theology of mediation in a greater cosmic context where the triune God is uniting all things to himself typified in the angels and the Elect.

The Last Mountain and the Last Words of Jerzy Kukuczka: The Mountaineer’s Diary as Panorama and Oligopticon

During his last expedition and just before his death on the South Face of Lhotse, the world-renowned Polish high-altitude climber Jerzy Kukuczka wrote a brief diary that provokes some general questions concerning the inner motivation of a mountaineer, but also the nature of mountaineering literature, to which the diary belongs. The laconic style of the diary suggests, following Philippe Lejeune, an invisible galaxy of the untold and unknown context beyond the text. Instead of reducing the diary to a literary text, the article attempts to treat it as a kind of logical tool that creates a cultural model of the world. Applying the anthropological concept of the collective, it analyzes Kukuczka’s diary as a kind of ontological mediation between nature and culture. Following Bruno Latour, the diary can be seen as both an oligopticon and a panorama, combining the richness of a partial network of collectives created in the process of climbing with the general view of the setting as the substantial entity of the mountain.

Creatio Ex Nihilo through the Prism of Father Sergei Bulgakov’s Sophiology

Father Sergei Bulgakov (1871–1944), directly influenced by Vladimir Solovyov and especially by Father Pavel Florensky, developed his sophiological concept which takes a central place in his doctrine of Trinity and God's economy. The main failure of the Russian sophiology is that the question of God's Wisdom is not Christologically founded in the spirit of the New Testament and patristic teaching. Bulgakov neglects the theology of God's uncreated energies. He thinks that it does not sufficiently explain the creation of the world as well as the relationship between God and the world. According to him, the creation of the world and its unity with God can be explained only through a mediator who acts as an “ontological bridge” between the Creator and the creation. Bulgakov, using the ontological mediation paradigms that are characteristic for certain ancient philosophical systems, especially Neo-Platonism, develops his doctrine of Sophia. She is immanent to both the nature of God and the creation. This attitude leads Bulgakov to the position of pantheism. In order to avoid this danger, he modifies his teaching introducing two models of Sophia: “Divine Sophia” and “Created Sophia”. Unlike the patristic theology, Bulgakov’s sophiological essentialism does not tend the antinomy of apophatic-kataphatic theology, and thereby he puts into question the ontological difference between the Creator and the creation. It is a failed attempt to interpret the dogma of the creation of the world ex nihilo, through categories and concepts that are alien to the church tradition.

Bytí a pravda Ježíše Krista: O vztahu ontologie a christologie v návaznosti na Klause Hemmerleho

In this paper, discussing the way metaphysics and Christology relate to each other, we will attempt to shed the light on the problem of the ontological mediation of the whole truth of Jesus Christ. Our argument will be developed in dialogue with selected Christological proposals of German­-speaking Catholic theology of the second half of the twentieth century (Rahner, Balthasar, Kasper, Hunermann) and, above all, with Trinitarian­-ontological and Trinitarian­-Christological approach of Klaus Hemmerle (1929–1994). Hemmerle’s most well-known essay Theses for a Trinitarian Ontology (Thesen zu einer trinitarischen Ontologie) deals with the problem of new genuinely Christian Trinitarian ontology. This simultaneously theological and philosophical approach could help us articulate the whole truth of Jesus Christ in a new, convincing manner. In conclusion, following Hemmerle, we will suggest where Christology becomes absolutely indispensable in relation to ontology.

THE IDEALIST VIEW OF DIVINE ACTION IN NATURE

AbstractTheologies of divine action in nature have sought to maximize traction with the sciences to secure their credibility. While varying in significant ways, all extant proposals share a commitment to physical realism, the claim that (at least some) physical entities and facts are both mind‐independent and ontologically basic within creation. However, I will argue that this metaphysical commitment undermines the body of scientific knowledge to which theologians wish to be responsive. Is there an alternative? Building on the work of Howard Robinson, I will show that there is a coherent account of mind's place in nature that denies physical realism. Such an account would enable a theological description of God's sustaining and governing action in nature through the ontological mediation of minds and laws causally constraining their sensations. Furthermore, this proposal yields a positive research program that makes essential use of the contributions of the natural sciences to understand the nature of embodiment.

Ontology mediation method for building multilingual ontologies

Ontology is an emerging technology in building knowledge based information retrieval systems. It is used to conceptualize the information in human understandable manner. Over the years, much importance was given to the systematic development of ontologies. As a result many methods and strategies to build ontology in different domains came up in the field of ontological engineering. These methods contained different steps to plan, design and build ontology efficiently. Most of these methods provided a generic structure to construct ontology. The development of ontology has cut across different domains and applications and this has arisen a need to develop methods to build ontologies in various applications. Nowadays, multilingual ontology applications are developed in various domains to have Knowledge based information retrieval according to the language preferred by user. Multilingual ontology allows sharing of information and data in different languages and thus facilitates multi-language users. A method to develop multilingual ontologies is in need now. In this paper, we propose an ontology mediation method to develop multilingual ontology applications. It explains the steps involved in the development process. A six step method is followed which is done iteratively to develop multilingual ontologies. Merging and mapping techniques are also used in mediation of multilingual ontologies. New algorithms are proposed for merging and mapping multilingual ontologies. The proposed method is experimented by developing multilingual ontology application for Thirukkural, the famous Tamil literature. The experimental results show that multilingual ontologies can be developed using the proposed method and semantic knowledge can be retrieved from the multilingual ontology.

Ontology Mediation to Rule them all: Managing the plurality in Product Service Systems

Ontology Mediation to Rule them all: Managing the plurality in Product Service Systems

Ontology Mapping and Rule-Based Inference for Learning Resource Integration

With the increasing demand for interoperability among existing learning resource systems in order to enable the sharing of learning resources, such resources need to be annotated with ontologies that use different metadata standards. These different ontologies must be reconciled through ontology mediation, so as to cope with information heterogeneity problems, such as semantic and structural conflicts. In this paper, we propose an ontology-mapping technique using Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) to generate semantic mapping rules that integrate learning resources from different systems and that cope with semantic and structural conflicts. Reasoning rules are defined to support a semantic search for heterogeneous learning resources, which are deduced by rule-based inference. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach enables the integration of learning resources originating from multiple sources and helps users to search across heterogeneous learning resource systems.

Ontology alignment design patterns

Interoperability between heterogeneous ontological descriptions can be performed through ontology mediation techniques. At the heart of ontology mediation lies the alignment: a specification of correspondences between ontology entities. Ontology matching can bring some automation but are limited to finding simple correspondences. Design patterns have proven themselves useful to capture experience in design problems. In this article, we introduce ontology alignment patterns as reusable templates of recurring correspondences. Based on a detailed analysis of frequent ontology mismatches, we develop a library of common patterns. Ontology alignment patterns can be used to refine correspondences, either by the alignment designer or via pattern detection algorithms. We distinguish three levels of abstraction for ontology alignment representation, going from executable transformation rules, to concrete correspondences between two ontologies, to ontology alignment patterns at the third level. We express patterns using an ontology alignment representation language, making them ready to use in practical mediation tasks. We extract mismatches from vocabularies associated with data sets published as linked open data, and we evaluate the ability of correspondence patterns to provide proper alignments for these mismatches. Finally, we describe an application of ontology alignment patterns for an ontology transformation service.

An Ontology-Based Collaborative Inter-Organisational Knowledge Management Network (CIK-NET)

Ontologies are widely used to represent knowledge explicitly but it is impractical to expect all individuals and organisations to agree on using one or a small subset of ontologies. The adoption of multiple ontologies causes ontology mismatches which make their inherent vocabularies and relationships become inconsistent, resulting in difficulty for one system to understand and reuse these ontologies. To achieve knowledge sharing and reuse, ontology mediation is required to reconcile mismatches between heterogeneous ontologies. In this paper, we investigate the application of ontology in knowledge management (KM). Many KM approaches have been developed with the purpose of managing organisational knowledge. However, these approaches only focus on managing intra-organisational knowledge, which is inadequate in current business environment because users are often required to access inter-organisational knowledge to complete their tasks. These approaches also fail to collaborate with each other as their designs are based on their own business and KM requirement in managing organisational knowledge. We argue that ontology and its mediation methods can be used to overcome limitation of non-collaborative problem in which individual organisation is unable to reuse inter-organisational knowledge. An ontology-based inter-organisational KM network is therefore proposed to allow organisations accessing and retrieving inter-organisational knowledge of common domain.

Pillars of Ontology Treatment in the Medical Domain

In this chapter the authors describe the three pillars of ontology treatment in the medical domain in a comprehensive case study within the large-scale THESEUS MEDICO project. MEDICO addresses the need for advanced semantic technologies in medical image and patient data search. The objective is to enable a seamless integration of medical images and different user applications by providing direct access to image semantics. Semantic image retrieval should provide the basis for the help in clinical decision support and computer aided diagnosis. During the course of lymphoma diagnosis and continual treatment, image data is produced several times using different image modalities. After semantic annotation, the images need to be integrated with medical (textual) data repositories and ontologies. They build upon the three pillars of knowledge engineering, ontology mediation and alignment, and ontology population and learning to achieve the objectives of the MEDICO project.

Social Support for Ontological Mediation and Data Integration

Most organizations store their data in several databases with no flexible mechanism for integration and access, and with no common vocabulary in place. Maintaining local vocabularies while realizing distributed access is a challenge that most organizations face regularly. For several years, the Semantic Web community has been developing algorithms for mapping data models (ontologies). Nevertheless, ontology mapping remains to be a great challenge, and humans are always expected to verify the results of existing automatic mapping tools. The spread of social web demonstrate the possibility of using collaborative techniques for reaching consensus and fostering user participation. While a number of prototypes for collaborative ontology construction are being developed, collaborative ontology mapping is not yet well investigated. In this article, the authors describe an approach that combines off-the-shelf ontology mapping tools with social software techniques to enable users to collaborate on mapping ontologies.

An FCA-based Solution for Ontology Mediation

In this paper, we present an ontology mediation solution based on the methods frequently used in Formal Concept Analysis. Our approach of mediation is based on the existence of instances associated to two source ontologies, then we can generate concepts in a new ontology if and only if they share the same extent. Hence our approach creates a merged ontology which captures the knowledge of these two source ontologies. The main contributions of this work are (i) to enable the creation of concepts not originally in the source ontologies, (ii) to propose a solution to label these emerging concepts and finally (iii) to optimize the resulting ontology by eliminating redundant or non pertinent concepts. Another contribution of this work is to emphasize that several forms of mediated ontology can be defined based on the relaxation of certain criteria produced from our method. The solution that we propose for tackling these issues is an automatic solution, meaning that it does not require the intervention of the end-user, excepting for the definition of the common set of ontology instances.

Building application ontologies from descriptions of Semantic Web Services

The existence of an increasing number of different ontologies used in semantic web service fields raises numerous interoperation and communication problems with respect to service discovery, composition, and execution. Current approaches for ontology mediation often fail due to their lack of sufficient semantic expressiveness and reasoning capability. In this paper, we present a novel approach allowing ontologies to provide self-contained semantics for service applications. We show how desired application ontologies can be generated using a new merging algorithm for service ontologies based on the names of the terms. We present experimental results and compare them to the output of the PROMPT ontology merging tool. This work is supported by the Science Foundation Ireland Grant No. SFI/02/i131, and the EU projects KnowledgeWeb (FP6-507482) and SemanticGov (FP6-027517).

A Hybrid Ontology Mediation Approach for the Semantic Web

This article introduces a hybrid ontology mediation approach for the Semantic Web. It combines both syntactic and semantic matching measures to provide better results for matching data labels. Although ontologies are meant to provide a shared conceptualization of the world, the development practices, lack of standards, and subjective naming conventions today, create data heterogeneity problems among ontologies. This is a significant problem particularly for ontologies of similar domains. Mediation techniques at present focus mainly on syntactic matching and our premise is that a hybrid approach would be a better solution to this problem. We provide empirical evidence with hypothesis tests and also provide several new measures such as relevance, reliability, and precision to validate our approach. We also introduce a detailed mapping algorithm.

Feature Analysis of Ontology Mediation Tools

Ontology mediation is enabled through interoperability of semantic data sources. It helps data sharing between heterogeneous knowledgebase and reuse by semantic applications. Ontology mediation includes operations such as, mapping, alignment, matching, merging and integration. After briefly describing these operations, this study selectively discusses set of methods, tools and data integration systems. It provides the researchers a comprehensive understanding of methods and tools intended for ontology mediation.

Ontological Mediation for Multi-Agent Systems

A major performance factor when gathering information across a platform like the World Wide Web is the efficiency of the search and retrieval system. The effectiveness of current search and retrieval systems is restricted as they do not use the semantics of the data but only utilize keywords. Using a multi-agent system where agents gather information and organize it, creating ontologies, is a very viable approach to the problem. Major difficulties that arise during collaboration among such information-providing agents are ambiguity and data misinterpretation. This is due to the diversity of ontology creators, differences in linguistics, and ontological overlapping. Users may also knowingly or unknowingly add incorrect information to ontologies. Ontological mediation tries to address such collaboration issues relating to ambiguous and unfamiliar information arising due to various reasons. We propose a communication-based approach for ontological mediation. In the process, we also present a classification model for ontological mediation.

Ontological Modularity and Spatial Diversity

ABSTRACTIn this paper we propose that adequate treatments of space need to be multiperspectival and related to sound foundational ontologies. To support this, we show that natural spatial descriptions commonly appeal to diverse theories of space and these need to be formally combined to be fully interpreted. Our account draws particularly on the foundational ontology DOLCE and the algebraic specification language CASL. We show how the structuring mechanisms of CASL suggest mechanisms for both building and combining multiperspectival ontologies of space. We also suggest that these mechanisms provide a natural link both with currently emerging cognitive principles such as blending and with developments in ontology mediation and mapping.

Semantic Integration of Manufacturing Data Sources

In order to gain insight into business processes, multiple autonomous data sources residing in the manufacture enterprise need to integrate not only on storage and access methods but also capturing the meaning of data to get a coherent and meaningful data views for different applications requirements. This paper presents a semantic-based architecture for the integration of heterogeneous manufacturing data sources. The integration is realized on a semantic level by the explicit presentation of data semantics with ontology and relationships between ontologies. During applications usage, heterogeneous data sources which represent relations of relevance are dynamically organized in terms of their semantics. The paper discusses some major problems in the architecture: unified schema transformation, semi-automatic ontology generation and mediation.

DEALING WITH SEMANTIC APPLICATION INTEGRATION WITHIN LARGE AND DYNAMIC ENTERPRISES

Nowadays, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) constitutes a real and growing need for most of enterprises, particularly for large and dynamic ones. Actually, the major problem of EAI is the heterogeneity problem, especially the semantic one. This latter is not correctly addressed by today's integration solutions, which focus mainly on syntactical integration. Dealing with the semantic aspect, which will certainly promote EAI by providing it more consistency and robustness, needs some appropriate principles such as ontology urbanization and mediation. These latter that constitute the main focus of this paper aim to favor the semantic application integration allowing to correctly capture, structure, master and reason upon the semantics, which currently constitutes a big challenge for several enterprises that are in quest of more flexibility and manageability.