Version Of Ontology Research Articles

The state of the additive manufacturing ontology landscape for enabling rapid response in times of crisis

This paper examines the current landscape of ontologies for describing additive manufacturing (AM) technologies and services. Through an extensive search, using both a bottom-up and top-down approach, four accessible AM ontologies were identified. These ontologies were then evaluated according to generally accepted principles and guidelines. It was found, that two of the four ontologies could deal as a starting point for a semantic core of a B2B AM services matchmaking platform. To remedy the existing problems of impracticability, underdevelopment, and lacking linkage to other ontologies, we see a gap in regathering of AM data in a FAIR and sustainable way, and deploying a re-engineered version of a candidate ontology.

TRANSCENDENTALISM, NATURALISM AND ONTOLOGY

The opposition between transcendentalism and naturalism plays a key role in discussions about consciousness at the confluence of phenomenology and analytical philosophy. Associated with it is a whole range of research programs. However, the opposition between transcendentalism and naturalism in these programs is, as a rule, operational and not thematic in nature and presupposes that 1) Transcendentalism and naturalism as traditions are initially alien to each other; 2) The domain of their opposition is ontology. The article attempts to problematize these premises based on one historical circumstance. Turning to the texts of Kant, the founder of transcendental philosophy, I intend to show that transcendentalism, which was first substantiated in them, is a version of naturalistic ontology, that is, a peculiarly interpreted naturalism that identifies nature with its natural scientific model and excludes constituting subjectivity from ontology. It is built not on the naturalization of phenomenology, but on the transcendentalization of natural science. Reinterpreting the experimental method in the spirit of the Copernican turn, Kant substantiates the apodictic nature and lack of alternative to the ontology of nature by turning nature into a correlate of consciousness and strictly limiting the principles of mathematical natural science to the boundaries of the phenomenal world. As a result, the true theme of philosophy—the thing in itself and transcendental subjectivity itself—is taken beyond the boundaries of ontology. The thematization of the naturalistic origins of transcendentalism and the removal of transcendental consciousness beyond the boundaries of ontology, carried out within its framework, thus reveals the problematic nature of these premises. The article also demonstrates that, despite significant differences in the understanding of transcendental philosophy and ontology between Kant and Husserl, the identified motives—the naturalistic nature of the ontological foundation and the meta-ontological character of transcendental subjectivity—remain of fundamental importance for the founder of phenomenology. This allows us to conclude that ontology is not the original domain of confrontation between transcendentalism and naturalism and to substantiate the compatibilist thesis according to which transcendentalism is compatible with ontological naturalism.

Towards a German labor market ontology: Challenges and applications

The labor market is an area with diverse data structures and multiple applications, such as matching job seekers with the right training or job. For this reason, the multilingual classification of European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) is a good example of the central role of ontologies in this area. However, ESCO cannot provide all the details of local labor market needs and does not provide links to other hierarchies of competences. For example, other taxonomies of occupations and skills are widely used in German-speaking countries, but they are not in a state where they are easily accessible for interoperability and reasoning. In this paper, we present a first version of a German Labor Market Ontology (GLMO) that uses ESCO as a top-level ontology for the target domain. This makes it highly interoperable and comparable to existing ontologies by providing details for the regional structures in German-speaking countries. In addition, we present a detailed evaluation of the provided data and applications, as well as an extensive discussion of future work.

Leibniz and Kant on God

Is Immanuel Kant’s critique of the proofs of God’s existence accurate? In order to answer this question, I analyse Leibniz’ proof in his “Monadology” and I determine the relation between the cosmological and the ontological version of this proof. Since Kant often refers (implicitly) to Leibniz’ argument, I examine Kant’s critique of rational theology in the Critique of Pure Reason in the light of Leibniz’ strategy. Kant’s critique of Leibniz’ argument is partly biased by his own concept of “transcendental idealism” and fails to reject it. On the other hand, many questions in Leibniz’ attempt remain still open.

O3PO: A domain ontology for offshore petroleum production plants

The challenge of integrating data from many data sources has persisted as an issue in several industry areas. With the evolution of technology in the upstream petroleum sector (i.e., exploration and production), the petroleum business must contend with technological silos from diverse service providers and suffers from the associated waste of time to locate data and information throughout siloed databases. Based on a thorough compilation of industry-oriented requirements in the form of use cases and competency questions, this document defines a domain ontology for defining entities in offshore petroleum production plants. The objective is to develop a uniform and clearly defined reference vocabulary to aid engineers and information technology professionals in labeling and relating production plant monitoring, simulation measures, and facilities. BFO is the top-level ontology, while GeoCore and a continuing version of the core ontology developed by the Industry Ontology Foundry (IOF) configure the middle-level ontologies. We have studied and combined several other resources to build the ontology, such as glossaries from the industry and related ontologies. The research resulted in a well-founded domain ontology that provides universals, defined classes, and relations that can be useful in several types of applications in the domain. We have demonstrated the utility of the ontology within an actual scenario in an offshore petroleum field in Brazil, where we conceived and applied the domain ontology. This study is a component of the PeTWIN project,22Petwin is an academic cooperation between UFRGS, UiO, and Libra, Equinor, and Shell companies (www.petwin.org). which looks at the best approaches for creating digital twins of offshore petroleum plants.

Scientific metaphysics and social science

Recently, philosophers have developed an extensive literature on social ontology that applies methods and concepts from analytic metaphysics. Much of this is entirely abstracted from, and unconcerned with, social science. However, Epstein (2015) argues explicitly that analytic social metaphysics, provided its account of ontological ‘grounding’ is repaired in specific ways, can rescue social science from explanatory impasses into which he thinks it has fallen. This version of analytic social ontology thus directly competes with radically naturalistic alternatives, in a way that helps to clarify what makes some metaphysics genuinely scientific (that is, part of the scientific enterprise and worldview). I consider this competition, marshal considerations against the value to social science of analytic metaphysics, and sketch a contrasting scientific metaphysics for understanding the implications of revisionist social ontology in unified scientific ontology.

Context-based refinement of mappings in evolving life science ontologies

BackgroundBiomedical computational systems benefit from ontologies and their associated mappings. Indeed, aligned ontologies in life sciences play a central role in several semantic-enabled tasks, especially in data exchange. It is crucial to maintain up-to-date alignments according to new knowledge inserted in novel ontology releases. Refining ontology mappings in place, based on adding concepts, demands further research.ResultsThis article studies the mapping refinement phenomenon by proposing techniques to refine a set of established mappings based on the evolution of biomedical ontologies. In our first analysis, we investigate ways of suggesting correspondences with the new ontology version without applying a matching operation to the whole set of ontology entities. In the second analysis, the refinement technique enables deriving new mappings and updating the semantic type of the mapping beyond equivalence. Our study explores the neighborhood of concepts in the alignment process to refine mapping sets.ConclusionExperimental evaluations with several versions of aligned biomedical ontologies were conducted. Those experiments demonstrated the usefulness of ontology evolution changes to support the process of mapping refinement. Furthermore, using context in ontological concepts was effective in our techniques.

Analysis and implementation of the DynDiff tool when comparing versions of ontology

BackgroundOntologies play a key role in the management of medical knowledge because they have the properties to support a wide range of knowledge-intensive tasks. The dynamic nature of knowledge requires frequent changes to the ontologies to keep them up-to-date. The challenge is to understand and manage these changes and their impact on depending systems well in order to handle the growing volume of data annotated with ontologies and the limited documentation describing the changes.MethodsWe present a method to detect and characterize the changes occurring between different versions of an ontology together with an ontology of changes entitled DynDiffOnto, designed according to Semantic Web best practices and FAIR principles. We further describe the implementation of the method and the evaluation of the tool with different ontologies from the biomedical domain (i.e. ICD9-CM, MeSH, NCIt, SNOMEDCT, GO, IOBC and CIDO), showing its performance in terms of time execution and capacity to classify ontological changes, compared with other state-of-the-art approaches.ResultsThe experiments show a top-level performance of DynDiff for large ontologies and a good performance for smaller ones, with respect to execution time and capability to identify complex changes. In this paper, we further highlight the impact of ontology matchers on the diff computation and the possibility to parameterize the matcher in DynDiff, enabling the possibility of benefits from state-of-the-art matchers.ConclusionDynDiff is an efficient tool to compute differences between ontology versions and classify these differences according to DynDiffOnto concepts. This work also contributes to a better understanding of ontological changes through DynDiffOnto, which was designed to express the semantics of the changes between versions of an ontology and can be used to document the evolution of an ontology.

τSQWRL: A TSQL2-Like Query Language for Temporal Ontologies Generated from JSON Big Data

Temporal ontologies allow to represent not only concepts, their properties, and their relationships, but also time-varying information through explicit versioning of definitions or through the four-dimensional perdurantist view. They are widely used to formally represent temporal data semantics in several applications belonging to different fields (e.g., Semantic Web, expert systems, knowledge bases, big data, and artificial intelligence). They facilitate temporal knowledge representation and discovery, with the support of temporal data querying and reasoning. However, there is no standard or consensual temporal ontology query language. In a previous work, we have proposed an approach named τJOWL (temporal OWL 2 from temporal JSON, where OWL 2 stands for “OWL 2 Web Ontology Language” and JSON stands for “JavaScript Object Notation”). τJOWL allows (1) to automatically build a temporal OWL 2 ontology of data, following the Closed World Assumption (CWA), from temporal JSON-based big data, and (2) to manage its incremental maintenance accommodating their evolution, in a temporal and multi-schema-version environment. In this paper, we propose a temporal ontology query language for rJOWL, named rSQWRL (temporal SQWRL), designed as a temporal extension of the ontology query language-Semantic Query-enhanced Web Rule Language (SQWRL). The new language has been inspired by the features of the consensual temporal query language TSQL2 (Temporal SQL2), well known in the temporal (relational) database community. The aim of the proposal is to enable and simplify the task of retrieving any desired ontology version or of specifying any (complex) temporal query on time-varying ontologies generated from time-varying big data. Some examples, in the Internet of Healthcare Things (IoHT) domain, are provided to motivate and illustrate our proposal.

Explanation Ontology: A general-purpose, semantic representation for supporting user-centered explanations

In the past decade, trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a focus for the AI community to ensure better adoption of AI models, and explainable AI is a cornerstone in this area. Over the years, the focus has shifted from building transparent AI methods to making recommendations on how to make black-box or opaque machine learning models and their results more understandable by experts and non-expert users. In our previous work, to address the goal of supporting user-centered explanations that make model recommendations more explainable, we developed an Explanation Ontology (EO). The EO is a general-purpose representation that was designed to help system designers connect explanations to their underlying data and knowledge. This paper addresses the apparent need for improved interoperability to support a wider range of use cases. We expand the EO, mainly in the system attributes contributing to explanations, by introducing new classes and properties to support a broader range of state-of-the-art explainer models. We present the expanded ontology model, highlighting the classes and properties that are important to model a larger set of fifteen literature-backed explanation types that are supported within the expanded EO. We build on these explanation type descriptions to show how to utilize the EO model to represent explanations in five use cases spanning the domains of finance, food, and healthcare. We include competency questions that evaluate the EO’s capabilities to provide guidance for system designers on how to apply our ontology to their own use cases. This guidance includes allowing system designers to query the EO directly and providing them exemplar queries to explore content in the EO represented use cases. We have released this significantly expanded version of the Explanation Ontology at https://purl.org/heals/eo and updated our resource website, https://tetherless-world.github.io/explanation-ontology, with supporting documentation. Overall, through the EO model, we aim to help system designers be better informed about explanations and support these explanations that can be composed, given their systems’ outputs from various AI models, including a mix of machine learning, logical and explainer models, and different types of data and knowledge available to their systems.

Averroes on Intellect: from Aristotelian Origins to Aquinas’s Critique

<i>Averroes on Intellect: from Aristotelian Origins to Aquinas’s Critique</i>

ВЧЕРА И СЕГОДНЯ: О ЛИТЕРАТУРНОЙ ОБРАБОТКЕ ПРОШЛОГО

The introduction to the archival collection “To Revive the Past Through Pedagogy: On History and Historicism in Children’s Literature” starts with a close reading of Yesterday and Today, a picture book for children, which the poet Samuil Marshak and the artist Vladimir Lebedev published in 1925 with the private press Raduga in Leningrad. Relying on clear binary schemes, the book presented temporal distinctions (yesterday/today) as a combination of differential features. Belonging to different time frames was presented not simply as a matter of chronology; also, it was read as a manifestation of cultural differences (old/new), that is, as differences constructed and appropriated through time, and, simultaneously, as a clear expression of historical differences (outdated/progressive), i.e., as differences that were rooted in a specific and therefore irreproducible context. The historical juxtaposition of the world of yesterday and the world of today was conceptualized in Yesterday and Today as a juxtaposition of two different orders of things — the things of the past vs. the things of the present. However, in the finale of the book this early Soviet version of the object-oriented ontology was transformed into something else: everyday objects reemerged as social symptoms. The order of things was re-coded as a metonym of a social order: behind everyday objects of the past and the present, there were “for- mer” and “new” people, lurking. This contrastive multilevel juxtaposition of yesterday and today diffused the linearity of history; the continuity of the material, intellectual, and social progression was subjected to purposeful fragmentation and polarization. And the habitual obviousness of the gap between “yesterday” and “today” was called upon to justify the organic — and therefore natural — essence of such fragmentations and breaks. Yesterday and Today was among the first Soviet books for children to articulate the contrastive method of the early Soviet historicism in a graphic and accessible way. The book’s poetics of historical discontinuities, gaps, and shifts provided an important foundation for the literary treatment of history in the early Soviet period. Moreover, the method of contrastive juxtaposition of the past and the present, of the good and the bad, of the heroic and the cowardly would be quickly turned into a popular narrative formula of Soviet literature for children. By grounding things and people in distinctive temporal settings, this early Soviet version of historicism could successfully organize the multidimensional and heterogenous coexistence of distinctive practices, mentalities, and symbolic frameworks. Incompatible things, styles, and ways of life were placed in their book on their own — separate — pages, as if to emphasize their historically discordant relations. The poetics of historical discontinuities evolved into a politics of historical incompatibility of heterogenous things, styles, and ways of life. By the middle of the 1930s, the poetics of historical discontinuities would be revised and reframed. A desire to juxtapose the past and the present would be replaced by the desire to demonstrate historical continuity. As an organizing model, “yesterday and today” would still be in use but its meaning would dramatically change: “today” would be perceived as a natural continuation of the revolutionary “yesterday.” “Gaps,” “breaks” and “shifts” would be pushed out by “stages” and “steps.” Historical allegories would make historicism ideologically useless and aesthetically irrelevant.

POSTMODERN PARODY AS ONTOLOGIZATION OF REALITY (BASED ON THE STORY BY D. BARTHELMY "A SHOWER OF GOLD")

The article examines the problem of postmodern parody from the point of view of its ontologizing potential, namely the interpretation within its limits of the problem of the subject. The concept of ontologization is interpreted in the tradition of the opposition to the paradigm of the philosophy of presence to extra-subjective versions of ontology, in particular the postmodern concept of intertextuality. The actualization of the parody concept as a formative tool along with the explicit or implicit accentuation of the integrity of the world picture is interpreted as a search for metaphysical grounds for the aesthetic system of postmodernism and D. Barthelemy's poetics. The article substantiates the philosophical aspect of the interpretation of parody accepted in the scientific literature as a mode of organization of the structure of the text and the form-content of the text in general for postmodern aesthetics. The universal nature of parody as an interpretive optics and postmodern technique of textual collage for literature in the conditions of the visual turn of the 20th-21st centuries is outlined. It has been found that the use of the collage technique in the form of cataloging reality as its reformatting is inherent in the poetics of D. Barthelemy. It is shown that parody for the writer is a formal and substantive principle, an artistic and aesthetic instruction, and not just a technique. The demonstrativeness, or "nakedness" of the parody is achieved by changing phrasal modes, alternating dialogues and descriptions, and visualizing the action. The structural levels of parody overlap both at the formal intertextual level and at the level of numerous pretexts and supporting semantic and symbolic series. Therefore, the transgression of parody manifests itself through the unity and separation of the coder and the decoder at the moment of forming the ethos of the fragmented text as its experience. It is concluded that grotesque and parody can be considered as synesthetic sense-generative models of postmodern literature. Parody as a vital receptive and cognitive form can ontologize the subject of the text. The grotesque is a paradoxical, finalized, objectified entelechy of parody, which is practically never ontologized and does not acquire features of subjectivity. Postmodern parody reformats the subject of the narrative and the text as a formal structure, thus giving it additional semantic dimensions.

An Ontological Approach to Information Integration in Data Intensive Domains

The development and support of knowledge-based systems for experts in the field of social network analysis (SNA) is complicated because of the problems of viability maintenance that inevitably emerge in data intensive domains. Largely this is the case due to the properties of semi-structured objects and processes that are analyzed by data specialists using data mining techniques and others automated analytical tools. Firstly, new sources (e. g. online social networks, published databases) constantly become available for gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data. Thus, new sources should be modelled and embedded in existing data structures maintaining logical consistency. Secondly, new techniques and underlying algorithms are also constantly being developed. Therefore, analysis results should be integrated with source data, and metamodels that describe the integration should be adaptable and extensible. Thirdly, the dynamism of semi-structured objects entails constant changes in knowledge models produced by domain experts and knowledge engineers. Considering that the same data could be used by different domain experts it is crucial not only to support traceability of changes in models but also to ensure independence of expert interpretation of these models. The analysis of existing approaches to information integration shows lack of solutions implementing traceability of changes. This paper introduces a novel approach to information integration based on ontological and production knowledge models to fill this gap. A conceptual description of the approach and an underlying set-theoretical model are given. The main difference of the given approach from the existing ones is the uniformity to the integration of different kinds of ontologies as well as different versions of ontologies using rule-based model of ontological mappings, which is demonstrated by the example of solving the special case of the problem of identifying key users (so-called bridges) in social networks.

Methods of group dynamics as the instrument of the stuff potential development in libraries

The purpose of the article is to present the first results of application of group dynamics methods in the Irkutsk regional library network as a tool for developing libraries personnel potential. In September 2021, a group of specialists of the Irkutsk Regional State Library – representatives of the administration, the scientificmethodological department, the department of cultural programs and the user service department – united into a core group, which started working on methods of group dynamics. The group identified a range of problems of libraries in the Irkutsk region, set goals and tasks for the development of the regional library and the library network of the Irkutsk region, formulated the mission of its activities, created the image of the future of the regional library network, and developed a roadmap for achieving this image of the future. The group expects to work for three years. Having mastered the methods of group dynamics in the ontological school version of “T-System” company and developed shared goals, values and rules, the group members define their functional areas and then form the «group of groups»: specialists from the Irkutsk Regional State Library or from the network of regional libraries and together continue the transformation of the library network. The first results of the group work have been obtained: methods of group dynamics allows to settle to solve complex collective tasks, to create projects of higher quality and degree of elaboration, to hold high-quality operational meetings with a large number of discussed issues. The work on implementing methods of group dynamics into the library network of the Irkutsk region as the instrument of developing the library stuff potential will be continued.

Review: Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds, by Jayna Brown

Review: <i>Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds</i>, by Jayna Brown

Observational/hydrographic data of the South Atlantic Ocean published as LOD

This article describes the publication of occurrences of Southern Elephant Seals Mirounga leonina (Linnaeus, 1758) as Linked Open Data in two environments (marine and coastal). The data constitutes hydrographic measurements of instrumented animals and observation data collected during censuses between 1990 and 2017. The data scheme is based on the previously developed ontology BiGe-Onto and the new version of the Semantic Sensor Network ontology (SSN). We introduce the network of ontologies used to organize the data and the transformation process to publish the dataset. In the use case, we develop an application to access and analyze the dataset. The linked open dataset and the related visualization tool turned data into a resource that can be located by the international community and thus increase the commitment to its sustainability. The data, coming from Península Valdés (UNESCO World Heritage), is available for interdisciplinary studies of management and conservation of marine and coastal protected areas which demand reliable and updated data.

What sewage sludge is and conflicts in Swedish circular economy policymaking

ABSTRACT Recycling nutrients from renewable sources, like sewage sludge, has been promoted as a step towards a circular economy by decreasing extraction and dependency on inorganic fertilizers. Implementation, however, is often controversial. In 2018, a Swedish governmental inquiry was commissioned to propose a complete ban on land application of sewage sludge to reduce soil pollution and increase phosphorus recovery. In 2020, the inquiry suggested two pathways, one to ban all land application, and one where agricultural land use should continuously be allowed. This paper is based on interviews with experts tied to the inquiry where they reference to sewage sludge, related objects, and future management. The inquiry’s inability to propose a coherent suggestion is analysed inspired by the concept of multiple ontology. Several ontological versions of sewage sludge emerge that unveil tensions between concepts of danger and cleanliness, pollution and naturalness, often captured in previous studies of waste. Some versions of sewage sludge conflict, which can explain the difficulty to establish an ontologically singular knowledge base for a transformation of sewage sludge from waste to resource. Though most of the experts agree that circular economy and nutrient recycling are good things, policymaking is caught in an ontological conundrum.

OWL ontology evolution: understanding and unifying the complex changes

AbstractKnowledge-based systems and their ontologies evolve due to different reasons. Ontology evolution is the adaptation of an ontology and the propagation of these changes to dependent artifacts such as queries and other ontologies. Besides identifying basic/simple changes, it is imperative to identify complex changes between two versions of the same ontology to make this adaptation possible. There are many definitions of complex changes applied to ontologies in the literature. However, their specifications across works vary both in formalization and textual description. Some works also use different terminologies to refer to a change, while others use the same vocabulary to refer to distinct changes. Therefore, there is a lack of a unified list of complex changes. The main goals of this paper are: (i) present the primary documents that identify complex changes; (ii) provide critical analyses about the set of the complex changes proposed in the literature and the documents mentioning them; (iii) provide a unified list of complex changes mapping different sets of complex changes proposed by several authors; (iv) present a classification for those complex changes; and (v) describe some open directions of the area. The mappings between the complex changes provide a mechanism to relate and compare different proposals. The unified list is thus a reference for the complex changes published in the literature. It may assist the development of tools to identify changes between two versions of the same ontology and enable the adaptation of artifacts that depend on the evolved ontology.

A Prototype for Diagnosis of Psoriasis in Traditional Chinese Medicine

Psoriasis is a chronic, non-communicable, painful, disfiguring and disabling disease for which there is no cure, with great negative impact on patients’ quality of life (QoL). Diagnosis and treatment with traditional Chinese medical technique based on syndrome differentiation has been used in practice for a long time and proven effective, though, up to now, there are only a few available studies about the use of semantic technologies and the knowledge systems that use Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)-syndrome differentiation for information retrieval and automated reasoning. In this paper we use semantic techniques based on ontologies to develop a prototypical system for the diagnosis of Psoriasis. For this purpose, a domain ontology is developed for syndrome differentiation of psoriasis vulgaris (PV). This ontology is founded on an adapted version of the general formal ontology (GFO), with the evidence-based clinical practice guideline of TCM for psoriasis vulgaris (Guideline 2013) as the primary data sources. The implemented prototype, called ONTOPV, contains this domain ontology and is aimed at a decision support system for diagnosis and treatment of PV. This system uses a case-database for Case Based Reasoning (CBR), combined with fuzzy pattern recognition. Experimental results show that the ONTOPV realizes the basic functionalities of data collection, querying, browsing and navigation, and supports rule-based knowledge reasoning, and integrates fuzzy pattern recognition. It can provide users with clinical decision support for TCM syndrome differentiation in diagnosis of psoriasis.