Relational Ontology Research Articles

Evolving “affordances” and “constraints” in mobile payment use: a study of Indian micro-enterprises’ UPI adoption process

PurposeThis research aims to uncover how the adoption process of a mobile payment solution unfolds in its local use. We examined micro-enterprises’ adoption of UPI-based payment system in India.Design/methodology/approachWe employed an ethnographic approach to study the micro-entrepreneurs’ daily practice and adopted a relational ontology to conduct an “in-practice” enquiry of the UPI payment adoption process.FindingsApplying the practice perspective of Technology Affordances and Constraints Theory, we found that UPI adoption was shaped through a dynamic interplay of emerging affordances and constraints. New features, such as All-in-one QR, enabled actions like cross-platform money transfer but also introduced challenges like fraud. Advancements in the technology addressed previous challenges but also created new hurdles. This cycle of evolving affordances and constraints within the contextual use of UPI payment technology shaped its adoption process.Research limitations/implicationsThe findings contribute to the existing body of mobile payment literature by elucidating the role of localized and ongoing enactment of affordances and constraints. Unlike existing adoption theories, using relational concepts of affordances and constraints revealed how the integration of mobile payment into practice leads to emergent use patterns and widespread adoption.Practical implicationsWe emphasize the need for solutions that address localized challenges and contextual needs. The study advises policymakers to consider technology’s benefits and limitations in interventions.Originality/valueThe study offers a unique view on mobile payment adoption, highlighting the role of technological materiality and temporality. It reveals how the changing materiality of technology shapes the adoption process through localized affordances and constraints.

Going upstream: a pluri-ontological analysis and proposal for Brazilian participatory water governance

ABSTRACT Despite the growing emphasis on ontological pluralism in environmental policy debates, innovation within national state environmental governance and management remains limited. This article outlines a conceptual framework for ontological inclusion and exclusion to examine constraints and opportunities in Brazilian participatory water governance. This involves an ontological policy cycle of the Suaçuí state river basin, a participatory process for water-body classification, and a water-body-classification instrument. River ontologies of the Suaçuí river basin and participatory process were found to be excluded from the water-body classification instrument through various practices and modes of exclusion. Relational ontologies, both indigenous and non-indigenous, were excluded. Building on the analysis of how ontological exclusion occurred, speculative design was engaged to critically imagine a pluralist ontological proposal. A database with diverse water inputs and outputs for more sustainable and inclusive planning is envisaged. This proposition grounds reflections on challenges for ontological inclusion in the context of political, economic, and social inequalities. Ontological inclusion and exclusion complement classic concepts of social and epistemic inclusion with distinct normative demands and propositions for established participatory environmental governance.

Ontological Relationship between Culture and Art Taste Communities

Ontological Relationship between Culture and Art Taste Communities

Agential Guts — Care and Creativity within the Messy Multi-species Assemblage

Agential Guts was an artistic multispecies practice of care; a messy entanglement with goats, soils, microbial companions, and gardening activities. The concern over biodiversity loss and many ecological crises caused by traditional farming led me to learn about alternative soil care and goat-keeping and to invent new modes of relating and caring in a multispecies context. The fieldwork drew from rewilding practices that strive to create biodiverse conditions. Configuring the meanings of multispecies assemblage beyond instrumentalising governance of different species, I followed what I called microbial desires in our relational enactments envisioning microbial and mammalian companionship from the more-than-human standpoint. My kin-making was my object of study from an academic perspective but the companion animals and microbes, soils, and plants were collaborators from the artistic point of view. The premises of new materialist and post-anthropocentric relational ontologies were embodied in our practice, where the matter was perceived as intelligent and affective, and thus able to lead to sources of novel ethical thinking-doing and art. I drew from the arts of noticing and considering collaboration as contamination (Tsing 2015) with messy, microbially saturated milieu. Acknowledging how scientific knowledge is always shaping our affective encounters, I also tried to speculate with what we know about microbes leaking between different bodies. In producing a situated knowledge platform, Agential Guts contributed to both art-based research and social studies of microbes by introducing a speculative and embodied way to create knowledge together with nonhumans. <style> /* rules to make button only show up in META */ .download-accessible { display:none; } .meta-right-col .download-accessible { display: inline-block; padding: 9px; margin-bottom:25px; border: 1px solid black; background-color:white; } </style> <a class="download-accessible" href="/profile/download-media?work=2936353&file=3307180" title="This accessible PDF is a derivative of the original which it is meant to support and not replace.">Download Accessible PDF</a>

The Representational Challenge of Integration and Interoperability in Transformed Health Ecosystems

Background/Objectives: Health and social care systems around the globe are currently undergoing a transformation towards personalized, preventive, predictive, participative precision medicine (5PM), considering the individual health status, conditions, genetic and genomic dispositions, etc., in personal, social, occupational, environmental, and behavioral contexts. This transformation is strongly supported by technologies such as micro- and nanotechnologies, advanced computing, artificial intelligence, edge computing, etc. Methods: To enable communication and cooperation between actors from different domains using different methodologies, languages, and ontologies based on different education, experiences, etc., we have to understand the transformed health ecosystem and all its components in terms of structure, function and relationships in the necessary detail, ranging from elementary particles up to the universe. In this way, we advance design and management of the complex and highly dynamic ecosystem from data to knowledge level. The challenge is the consistent, correct, and formalized representation of the transformed health ecosystem from the perspectives of all domains involved, representing and managing them based on related ontologies. The resulting business viewpoint of the real-world ecosystem must be interrelated using the ISO/IEC 21838 Top Level Ontologies standard. Thereafter, the outcome can be transformed into implementable solutions using the ISO/IEC 10746 Open Distributed Processing Reference Model. Results: The model and framework for this system-oriented, architecture-centric, ontology-based, policy-driven approach have been developed by the first author and meanwhile standardized as ISO 23903 Interoperability and Integration Reference Architecture. The formal representation of any ecosystem and its development process including examples of practical deployment of the approach, are presented in detail. This includes correct systems and standards integration and interoperability solutions. A special issue newly addressed in the paper is the correct and consistent formal representation Conclusions: of all components in the development process, enabling interoperability between and integration of any existing representational artifacts such as models, work products, as well as used terminologies and ontologies. The provided solution is meanwhile mandatory at ISOTC215, CEN/TC251 and many other standards developing organization in health informatics for all projects covering more than just one domain.

Thinking multimodal translation through relational ontology

ABSTRACT This article envisions a novel way of conceiving of the nature of multimodal translation by thinking it through relational ontology–a philosophical position that views relations as primary and singularities as secondary. Relational ontology is applied here to relationships between modes constituting multimodal wholes. While Translation Studies has traditionally focused on the verbal mode and treated the modes as singularities, when multimodal translation is understood through relational ontology, the focus of inquiry shifts to the relationships between modes. Thus, rather than conceiving of individual modes as singularities that make meaning by addition, meaning is a synthesis of the modes and requires the embodied perceiver’s engagement with and interpretation of the co-presented materials. Changing the perspective of Translation Studies from a verbal to relational ontology allows us to focus on the relationships between modes instead of framing modes through hierarchical relationships, and to look beyond the restrictive tendency of Translation Studies to frame multimodal entities as texts. The focus on relations between modes also allows us to envision connections between the cognitive and embodied dimensions of multimodal meaning construction. Relational ontology brings methodological challenges, because methods must be found that allow us to focus on the relationships between modes.

Modern political myth: socio-ontological analyses

Relevance. The appeal to the topic of socio-ontological research of political myth is caused by the fact that in the conditions of rapidly becoming more complicated socio-political reality and the emergence of qualitatively new entities of social and political existence, conceptually holistic approaches to the study of political myth are practically not covered in Russian and world literature against the background of many political science, linguistic and socio-cultural studies.The purpose is to reveal the ontological essence of the political myth within the framework of its theoretical and practical application, taking into account the specifics of the social processes taking place in modern world politics.Оbjectives: to study the history of formation and the main approaches to the definition of the concept of "political myth"; to give a refined definition of the concept of "political myth" within the framework of our research; to conduct a categorical analysis of individual aspects of modern political reality; to formulate recommendations on the socio-ontological interpretation of modern political myth and work with it in world politics, diplomacy and public life.Methodology. Categorical-logical, system-structural, dialectical method, as well as hermeneutical and semantic analysis were used as a methodological basis.Results. The principles, strategies and approaches of social ontology in relation to the modern realities of world politics are analyzed.Conclusions. The results of our analysis have shown that the phenomenon of political myth has its own history of formation and study mainly in its connection with sociological, political science, socio-philosophical, socio-psychological and psycholinguistic studies. In the framework of this study, through the prism of social ontology, we consider both the dynamics and invariants of the processes of mythologization and myth-making, which are in a state of transition from "unipolarity" to "multipolarity". This is how we come to understand the political myth as a system of attributive and modal "coordinates" that define a model of a socio-political phenomenon or process in the context of power relations (co) subordination. The results obtained can be applied in lawmaking, diplomatic activities, "demythologization" and "peremythologization", teaching various courses, for example, on social and political philosophy.

Flotation Devices Re-stor(y)ing Haunted South African Ocean Herstories through Mending as a Decolonial Love Language

ABSTRACT This paper engages in a dialogical meaning ∞ making between South African Story-tailor Cleo Droomer and sociologist/artist Dylan McGarry, exploring Droomer's creation of “floatation devices” or “Life(Jackets).” Using a “pedagogy of echolocation” that surfaces the living archival memory of Droomer's artworks, the authors navigate the haunted entanglements implicit with our relationships with the ocean. Their tactile research, rooted in personal and intergenerational trauma, utilizes heirloom fabrics to craft social wearable sculptures. These pieces facilitate a dialogue with his ancestors, from the apartheid-induced removal of his grandparents from the ocean to his enslaved forebears. Droomer's work highlights the ocean's role in the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trades, underscoring the need for recognizing it as a site of remembrance and intangible heritage. This contrasts with the acknowledgment of other sites of human suffering, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging the ocean's historical significance. KEY POLICY HIGHLIGHTS Our oceans are haunted in South Africa by complex exclusions, violence’s and sunken histories, and require re-configured “flotation devices” to surface them. The rush for Oil and Gas and other extractive rapid Blue Economy activities are not just violently excluding marginalized communities, they erase the necropolitics of our ocean. Art-making as a form of thinking, theorizing and re-membering/re-configuring our histories can offer ways to surface and work with our ocean heritage with the context of Blue Economy expansion. Global Bodies like the International Sea-bed Authority (ISA) and UNESCO overlook the seabed and ocean as sites of human suffering and cultural history, and should consider Droomer’s sculptural policy briefs, i.e. (Life)Jackets. Social Sculpture and “story-tailoring” offers ongoing living archives or “an-archives” to support meaningful approaches to practicing Ubuntu and re-figuring our relational ontologies with the ocean. Mending both as a practice, and as a figurative theory is an embodied phronesis for decolonial justice, or “love-language.”

An Ontological Relation Between Priesthood and Celibacy?

For centuries, the nature of the Catholic priesthood has been and continues to be the subject of theological debate. Among other things, this article discusses the connection between celibacy and the sacrament of priesthood. Some theologians claim that there is an ontological connection between celibacy and ordination. This article examines such a claim, trying to answer the question: is celibacy really ontologically connected to priesthood and is there an ontological change in the person who receives this sacrament, which necessarily includes celibacy? Based on the analysis, the author concludes that priestly ordination cannot cause an ontological change in a person, and therefore, celibacy is not ontologically connected to ordination either.

The Light Verse between Philosophy and Sufism: A Comparative Analysis of the Interpretations by Ibn Sīnā and al-Ghazālī

In this article, we will analyze two treatises written from philosophical and Sufi perspectives as interpretations of the Light Verse. They were authored by Ibn Sīnā and Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, two exceptional authoritative scholarly figures of Islamic sciences with a very high representative power with their writings in multiple dimensions of philosophical and Sufi studies. We will examine the epistemological implications of the philosophical and Sufi ontological designs expressed in the treatises. We will comparatively analyze the contents they present concerning the origin and beginning of existence and the relationship between God and all other beings. Throughout our analyses, we will particularly concentrate on the interpretations regarding the following fundamental questions addressed in the treatises: What is the origin and reality of existence? What kind of ontological and epistemological relationships are there between different kinds of beings? Moreover, what kind of ontological and epistemological connections are there between God and man?

Analysis of mechanical properties and ontological relationships of snow crystals: Progress and prospects

Analysis of mechanical properties and ontological relationships of snow crystals: Progress and prospects

Bodies and learning trajectories: a ‘post’ feminist approach to the experience of Spanish students in higher education

ABSTRACT Feminist theories have broadly delved into the discourse surrounding bodies (Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Their contributions have subverted the idea that bodies are merely passive matter, opening up new ways of conceptualizing the world in corporeal terms. Their insights have been useful in understanding that human bodies emerge in situated-historical encounters, and cannot be separated from mind. This holds significant implications for the field of education (hooks, bell. 1994. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Abingdon: Routledge). In this article, we depart from the project ‘TRAY-AP: Learning trajectories of undergraduate students: conceptions, strategies, technologies, and contexts'. Reading from ‘posts’ perspectives such as feminist new materialisms, the affective turn or posthumanisms, helps us to think through relational ontologies, beyond dualisms, embracing a commitment to the human and morethan-human bodies. Through these perspectives, the project helps us to deepen into how Spanish higher education students conceive their bodies and the role of bodies in their learning trajectories. The paper concludes by shedding light on how bodies are still considered inert beings, but students see their learning processes as corporeal and embodied, intersected by gender struggles.

Navigating athlete development in elite sport: Understanding the barriers to the provision of performance lifestyle service in England

The English Performance Lifestyle (PL) service is a Career Assistance Program that aims to support British elite athletes in their holistic development throughout their time in elite sport to support their mental health and career prospects during and following their careers as athletes. Yet, despite the widespread existence and significant funding dedicated to this service, researchers have identified how it is often not fully embedded or used by sport organizations. Therefore, the aim of this study was to extend previous research by understanding the barriers to the provision of the PL service. Underpinned by ontological relativism and epistemological constructivism, 25 Performance Lifestyle Practitioners (PLPs) working in elite sport participated in a qualitative survey and focus groups. The data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Four themes were developed: There's a Mountain to Climb, It's a Crowded Train, You Need an Elevator Pitch and A Seat at the Performance Table. These themes highlight the barriers PLPs face in supporting athletes with their growth and development during their athletic career. The results offer unique insight into PLPs' roles and the challenges they encounter. As such, we offer practical implications including the importance of organizational support, encouraging athletes to develop a multidimensional identity and a variety of narratives that would offer athletes and practitioners another way to be in elite sport. We also offer recommendations for future research aimed at advancing the practice of PLPs to optimize support for elite athletes, such as including diverse perspectives and including both athlete and practitioner voice in the development of Career Assistance Programs.

Beyond postcolonial heteronomy: Kurdish question, decolonisation, and the relational time of democratic confederalism

Abdullah Öcalan’s theory of democratic confederalism, emerging from the Kurdish anti-colonial struggle against the states of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria, diverges from a postcolonial framework by centring on social ecology. This paper argues that Öcalan’s approach signifies a rejection of the ‘heteronomy’ of postcolonial theory’s ‘dualist imaginary’, which reduces the interactive agencies shaping societies’ transformation to those implicated in the West–Rest binary. This binarism perpetuates a ‘ruptured’ understanding of non-Western political histories and a dualist notion of ‘unevenness’ that either neglects ‘inter-subaltern’ hierarchical relations – including colonial ones – or distorts their historical and agential roots. Öcalan’s theory, addressing the Kurdish condition as a constellation of fragmented ‘inter-subaltern’ colonies, implies a rejection of heteronomy both analytically and normatively. Analytically, it highlights the simultaneous transformation of state institutions and statelessness through intersocietal interactions, illuminating how the ‘unevenness of possibilities’ influences interactive transformations. Normatively, it aims to address the ‘uneven possibilities’ for ‘interactive’ political ‘doing’ and ‘alterations’, empowering suppressed ‘otherness’ through ‘interactive autonomy’. These proposals promote a relational and interactive understanding of time, framed around the core notion of ‘time as possibility’, which is crucial for advancing a relational international ontology and a decolonising perspective beyond the obstacle of heteronomy.

The craft of rock climbing: exploring the implications of relational ontologies for learning to rock climb

AbstractThis paper explores how relational ontologies challenge the conception of skill development in rock climbing. Using especially the concepts of Tim Ingold and Phil Mullins, the paper suggests that pro-environmental behaviours, and relationships to place, can be fostered by direct involvement in skills development. This ontology is at odds with dualistic approaches that see climbing and pro-environmental behaviours as tensioned concepts. It is also contrary to historic practice theories that see climbing development as deriving from mastering oneself and conquering the climb. The paper proposes that climbing can be better understood as a craft and that each climb can be seen as co-created by the correspondence between the climber and the rock. This approach challenges the anthropocentric concept of the climb as a challenge to be overcome by skill and human endeavour, and instead suggests that a perspective of climbing as a craft better recognises the shared agency of the assemblage of rock and climber. Consequently, the paper suggests that completed rock climbs can be seen as co-evolved expressions of knowledge and action, and thus that climbing skills and pro-environmental behaviours derive from a creative process of engagement with the solid reality of the rock.

Battery testing ontology: An EMMO-based semantic framework for representing knowledge in battery testing and battery quality control

The demand for advanced battery management systems (BMSs) and battery test procedures is growing due to the rising importance of electric vehicles (EVs) and energy storage systems. The diversity of battery types, chemistries and application scenarios presents challenges in designing and optimizing BMSs and determining optimal battery test strategies. To address these challenges, semantic web technologies and ontologies offer a structured and common vocabulary for information sharing and reuse in battery management and testing. This work introduces the Battery Testing Ontology (BTO), a standardized, comprehensive, and semantically flexible framework for representing knowledge in electrical battery testing and quality control. BTO models a variety of electrical battery cell tests, specifying required test hardware and calibration procedures, mechanical fixturing of batteries, and referencing electrical measurement data. For example, it supports electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, self-discharge and high-voltage separator tests, the latter specifically demonstrating separator requirements, hardware specifications, and measurement details. Positioned within the ontology ecosystem of materials science, BTO aligns with the Elementary Multiperspective Material Ontology (EMMO) and related domain ontologies such as the Characterization Methodology Ontology (CHAMEO). This work elaborates on BTO’s development, structure, components and applications, highlighting its significant contributions to the field of battery testing.

Genome-wide characterization of melatonin biosynthetic pathway genes in carnation (Dianthus caryophyllus L.) and their expression analysis in response to exogenous melatonin

Carnation (Dianthus caryophyllus L.) is a prominent floricultural crop valued for its diverse colors, offering significant economic and ornamental value globally. However, the global demand for its flowers makes flower yield an important attribute that relies on the quantity of lateral branches in the crop. Melatonin as a multi-regulatory phytohormone play vital functions in governing plant growth and development. It is synthesized from tryptophan via four key enzymes. Tryptophan decarboxylase (TDC), Tryptamine 5-hydroxylase (T5H), Serotonin N-acetyltransferase (SNAT), and N-Acetylserotonin O-methyltransferase (ASMT). Although the significance of melatonin is recognized, its impact on the growth and development of carnation remains understudied. In the current study, we investigated the effect of exogenous melatonin at different concentrations, on growth pattern of carnation, followed by genome-wide characterization, in-silico analysis and expression profiling of melatonin biosynthetic pathway genes. Results showed increased branching and reduced height with increased melatonin concentrations up to a point. In-silico analysis identified ten genes in the melatonin biosynthetic pathway, including two TDC, two T5H, one SNAT, and five ASMT members. Domain analysis confirmed the presence of characteristic domains such as pyridoxal-dependent decarboxylase, cytochrome P450, Acetyltransferase_1, and O-methyltransferase. Physiochemical properties, gene structure, conserved motifs, promoter regions, gene ontology, synteny, and evolutionary relationships through phylogeny were also analysed. Sub-cellular localization predictions showed distribution of melatonin biosynthetic enzymes across various cellular compartments. Expression analysis of these genes under different exogenous melatonin concentrations (100, 200, 300, 400, 500, and 1000 µM) revealed significant upregulation at 100 µM and 500 µM, while no change was observed at 1000 µM. These findings suggest that optimal exogenous melatonin concentrations enhance the expression of biosynthetic pathway genes ultimately led to increased branching in carnation due to increased endogenous melatonin levels. This study establishes a basis for future functional characterization of melatonin biosynthetic pathway genes to elucidate their roles in carnation growth and development.

Ghostly Entanglements and Ruptures

This analysis considers how education positioned at the intersections of literature and nature can help expose and confront the violence of animal agriculture. To do so, it extends from field research in London, Canada, with children who discursively and materially engaged with the story Charlotte’s Web through guided walks in an altered landscape. Once farmland and now a rapidly declining forest behind their school, this sociohistorical space is home to lingering remnants of an animal agricultural past that evoke the pastoral imagery of the novel. In combination with a place-based lens that recognizes settler-colonial agrarian legacies, the animals and interspecies relations of Charlotte’s Web offer an invitation into seeing and empathizing with farmed animals, both past and present. This analysis traces theoretical and pedagogical pathways that challenge embedded anthropocentrism and promote diverse subjective engagements with the multispecies world. Together, Indigenous ways of knowing, relational ontologies, and Derrida’s notion of hauntology can help illuminate an ethically and environmentally engaged literacy education within the Anthropocene.

Undisciplining the Museum: Indigenous Relationality as Religion

What does it mean to decolonize or undiscipline the anthropology museum? What happens when the museum is confronted by Indigenous and descendant communities who demand an ethic of care rooted in relational ontologies and epistemologies? This article features Indigenous creativity as it has disrupted ‘business as usual’ in anthropology museums. This is primarily evidenced by Fork Peck Tribes who confronted the University of Montana to enact a long-overdue repatriation. Additional examples from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard demonstrate diverse expressions of relationality among Indigenous and descendant communities. These interventions are analyzed through Critical Indigenous Theory to specify the ways in which Indigenous religious traditions refuse the narratives and norms of settler colonial knowledge production and undermine the imperial museological practices of preservation. Instead, relationality is prioritized in the caretaking of and connection with more-than-human entities and materials in the museum. This article emphasizes relationality and repatriation as religious acts that challenge assumptions embedded in imperial and settler colonial approaches to history and science. From various social locations and through multiple strategies, we see the active undisciplining of the museum by Indigenous and descendant communities.

Parameter Identification and Energy Dissipation Analysis of Premium Connections Based on the Iwan Model

The premium connection is an important section of the tubing column. Under intricate downhole conditions, axial vibration generates alternating loads that cause energy dissipation between the sealing surfaces of the premium connection, reducing sealing performance. To investigate this issue, the mutual conversion process of sticking, slipping, and macroscopic slipping stages between the sealing surfaces of the premium connection under axial loads must be assessed. In this study, a finite element analysis model of a taper–taper Φ88.9 mm × 6.45 mm P110 premium connection is developed based on the discrete Iwan model’s ontological relationship, and the sealing surface’s force–displacement hysteresis curve is obtained. The equivalent Iwan model for this particular premium connection is constructed by discretizing the hysteresis curve and identifying the model’s four sets of parameters. The correctness of the parameter identification method of the equivalent Iwan model is verified by comparing and analyzing the similarity of the two models. The energy dissipation in the sealing surfaces of the premium connection for different working conditions under dynamic loading is analyzed. This study reveals that the area similarity of the hysteresis curves of the two models is more than 92%, while the positional error is less than 2%. The sealing surface displacement amplitude of the premium connection is between 0.04 mm and 0.07 mm, while the sealing surface energy dissipation increases linearly, which may lead to a decline in sealing performance.