Semantic View Research Articles

Evaluating the validity of data instances against ontology evolution over the Semantic Web

It is natural for ontologies to evolve over time. These changes could be at structural and semantic levels. Due to changes to an ontology, its data instances may become invalid, and as a result, may become non-interpretable. In this paper, we address precisely this problem, validity of data instances due to ontological evolution. Towards this end, we make the following three novel contributions to the area of Semantic Web. First, we propose formal notions of structural validity and semantic validity of data instances, and then present approaches to ensure them. Second, we propose semantic view as part of an ontology, and demonstrate that it is sufficient to validate a data instance against the semantic view rather than the entire ontology. We discuss how the semantic view can be generated through an implication analysis, i.e., how semantic changes to one component imply semantic changes to other components in the ontology. Third, we propose a validity identification approach that employs locally maintaining a hash value of the semantic view at the data instance.

Whose Meanings?: Resignifying Voices and Their Social Locations

My philosophical reflections in this essay will revolve around the following question linking meaning and identity: What is the relationship between cultural products and the individuals and groups that create them? More specifically, what is the relation between racial and ethnic meanings and the racial and ethnic groups in which they originate? There are two extreme semantic views that answer this question in highly problematic and inappropriate ways. On the one hand, there are those who tie meanings to their originating expressive communities in a rigid way, claiming that there are proprietary relations between semantic structures and the people who created them. On the other hand, there are those who think that meanings can be completely detached from their originating cultural contexts and completely decoupled from the experiences of their users, becoming portable semantic structures as soon as they are created, that is, becoming usable by any body in any context. Since meanings are treated as properties to fight over by these polarized views, I will use an economic metaphor to analyze and discuss them. I will call the first semantic view the Monopoly Model and the second one the Free Trade Model. By contrast, my own view departs from these economic views of meaning as property and understands meanings as relational?as complex sets of relations or relational structures?rather than as property. In the first section of this article, drawing on Alain Locke and Pierre Bourdieu, I will identify the pitfalls of polarized (economic) semantic models and will articulate a critique of their central assumptions. In section 2, I will sketch my relational model of ethnic and racial meanings, which can overcome the difficulties of the existing polarized views. My discussion will highlight the opportunities and obstacles that exist for subversion and symbolic transformations in our cultural practices, trying to show how they are either obscured or clarified by competing semantic models.

Sunt lacrimae rerum: An Exploration in Meaning

The half-line at Aeneid 1.462, sunt lacrimae rerum, although one of the most quoted and controversial utterances in Vergil�s poem, has received little scrutiny from the point of view of linguistic semantics and pragmatics. This paper explores the interpretive options in these terms, and argues that their semantic and referential indeterminacy is both intentional and poetically productive, lending it an implicational richness most readers find attractive.

Technical Knowledge Management Platform Based on Ontology Engineering and XML Technology Embodiment of Foundation of Externalization, Sharing, and Co-creation Support of Functional Knowledge for Artifacts

We propose new knowledge management system, which is based on ontology engineering and XML technology, for manufacturing field. The purpose of this system is to support to externalize implicit functional knowledge of a product that a designer creates, to share the knowledge among those who are involved in the product development, and utilize the knowledge for any designer to collaboratively create or invent new products. It is true, however, there are not a few superior design tool such as CAD/CAE software, simulation tools, etc. Though such tools are indispensable to complete a product, they are insufficient to reveal design rational of a designer that indicates the reason why he/she adopted the function, the structure, materials, etc. Ontology engineering contributes to clarify design rational of any designer by describing a function decomposition tree (hereinafter FDT), which has the specific feature of separating function and way, that is a kind of tree to show functional structure based on device ontology and functional ontology. While the functional modeling framework is independent to any data representation infrastructure, XML has a synergy with the framework because of being able to handle semantics of the framework such as subject, object, function, etc. In addition to the semantic view point, XML also has flexibility to compound a document from multiple information fragments, so that it allows FDT to adapt to any application of manufacturing tasks. From those view point, we created OntoGear which is the foundation system that supports a designer or developer to author, share, and use FDT by using xfy technology that JustSystems, Corp. has developed as an XML application development framework.

Mathematical Idealization

Mathematical idealizations are scientific representations that result from assumptions that are believed to be false, and where mathematics plays a crucial role. I propose a two stage account of how to rank mathematical idealizations that is largely inspired by the semantic view of scientific theories. The paper concludes by considering how this approach to idealization allows for a limited form of scientific realism.

Italian split intransitivity and image schemas

This paper explores the choice between the auxiliaries BE and HAVE with Italian intransitive verbs. Most attempts to account for split intransitivity in Italian, as well as in other Romance languages, can be roughly grouped into two categories: the syntactic perspective and the semantic view. In this article I propose that instead of attempting to identify one single parameter responsible for the choice between BE and HAVE, the Romanists should, as our colleagues in other language families have already done, consider the auxiliary selection in terms of a combination of motivations related to the speakers’ conceptualization of the event and to their access to the relevant image schema. This proposition prompts us to reassess the conclusions previously reached by researchers working with aphasic subjects. In addition, it fosters integration between cognitive linguistics and neuroscience by providing a solution to the so-called “Granularity Mismatch Problem.”

Contextualism and the Epistemological Enterprise

Epistemic contextualism (EC) is primarily a semantic view, viz. the view that ‘knowledge’-ascriptions can change their contents with the conversational context. To be more precise, EC is the view that the predicate ‘know’ has an unstable Kaplanian character, i.e., a character that does not map all contexts on the same content. According to EC, ‘know’ is thus an indexical expression. Notwithstanding this purely linguistic characterization of EC, contextualists have traditionally argued that their views have considerable philosophical impact, this being due to the alleged fact that their linguistic views about ‘know’ provide the resources for a resolution of sceptical puzzles. In this paper I will address an objection to EC, claiming that, as a linguistic view about the term ‘know’, EC cannot be of any epistemological significance.

Where Have All the Theories Gone?

Although the recent emphasis on models in philosophy of science has been an important development, the consequence has been a shift away from more traditional notions of theory. Because the semantic view defines theories as families of models and because much of the literature on “scientific” modeling has emphasized various degrees of independence from theory, little attention has been paid to the role that theory has in articulating scientific knowledge. This paper is the beginning of what I hope will be a redress of the imbalance. I begin with a discussion of some of the difficulties faced by various formulations of the semantic view not only with respect to their account of models but also with their definition of a theory. From there I go on to articulate reasons why a notion of theory is necessary for capturing the structure of scientific knowledge and how one might go about formulating such a notion in terms of different levels of representation and explanation. The context for my discussion is the BCS account of superconductivity, a ‘theory’ that was, and still is, sometimes referred to as a `model'. BCS provides a nice focus for the discussion because it illuminates various features of the theory/model relationship that seem to require a robust notion of theory that is not easily captured by the semantic account.

Towards a grande paradigmatique of film: Christian Metz reloaded

This paper synthesizes and extends all previous accounts of filmic montage made within the broadly Metzian semiotic tradition in order to demonstrate that the semiotics of film and of verbal language share major features of their organization. Drawing on recent advances in formal and functional linguistic discourse semantics, the paper provides an analysis scheme that supports a film-as-discourse perspective along both the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes of semiotic description. Previous approaches are shown to have been restricted to views of compositional semantics only appropriate for syntax. This has compromised their effectiveness for providing an appropriate empirical basis for investigating film.

Existence, Freedom, Identity, and the Logic of Abstractionist Realism

From the point of view of proof-theoretic semantics, we examine the logical background invoked by Neil Tennant's abstractionist realist account of mathematical existence. To prepare the way, we must first look closely at the rule of existential elimination familiar from classical and intuitionist logics and at rules governing identity. We then examine how well free logics meet the harmony and uniqueness constraints familiar from the proof-theoretic semantics project. Tennant assigns a special role to atomic formulas containing singular terms. This, we find, secures harmony and uniqueness but militates against the putative realism.

Saul Kripke’s naturalized metaphysics

This article starts with an examination of Saul Kripke’s views of the semantics of modal logic and concludes by pointing to some epistemological and ontological consequences of those views that seem to be incompatible with the way empirical science in fact works and progresses. In dealing with the problem of identifying the same objects in different possible worlds, Kripke is led to develop his original positions on topics such as the theses of the fixation of the reference independent of meaning (where he disagrees with Frege) and the noncoincidence between necessary and a priori truths (where he disagrees with Kant). In Kripke’s view, it is a particular type of knowledge – scientific knowledge – that determines what should be considered as essential or necessary. And the statements that represent these a posteriori scientific discoveries “are not,” in his words, “contingent truths, but truths that are necessary in the strictest possible sense.” Thus, in Kripke’s view, our (scientific) knowledge determines without distortion the essential properties of what is real, which turns his ontology into a direct function of the discoveries of empirical science. This “naturalization of ontology”, as shown in the conclusion of this article, is not compatible with recognition of the defeasibility of our semantic or scientific criteria and overloads scientific the endeavor with a metaphysical burden which science itself does not claim and is not capable of carrying. Key words: fixation of reference, a posteriori necessity, naturalized ontology.

Instructions, context and compositionality: How to combine functional, lexical and interpretive dimensions of meaning

The purpose of this article is to give an overview of how the construction of meaning may be explained, from the point of view of Instructional Semantics as the authors see it. A number of examples are discussed, primarily to illustrate the explanatory power of the framework, but also to illustrate its weak points. It is argued that meaning is established in an interpretive process initiated by linguistic expressions. The distinction between lexemes and functional items is applied to account for the systematic ways in which linguistic expressions contribute to the process. It is furthermore shown how language interacts dialectically with context in the construction of meaning. The term ‘meaning’ will be used throughout about both the initial semantic ‘input’, and about the output that is constructed as a result of the process described above. When there is a risk of confusion, we will use the term ‘instructional meaning’ about the linguistic input.

Realism about Structure: The Semantic View and Nonlinguistic Representations

The central concern of this article is whether the semantic approach has the resources to appropriately capture the core tenets of structural realism. Chakravartty (2001) has argued that a realist notion of correspondence cannot be accommodated without introducing a linguistic component, which undermines the approach itself. We suggest that this worry can be addressed by an appropriate understanding of the role of language in this context. The real challenge, however, is how to incorporate the core notion of ‘explanatory approximate truth’ in such a way that the emphasis on structure is retained.

Models and the Semantic View

I begin by distinguishing two notions of model, the notion of a truth-making structure and the notion of a mathematical model (in one specific sense). I then argue that although the models of the semantic view have often been taken to be both truth-making structures and mathematical models, this is in part due to a failure to distinguish between two ways of truth-making; in fact, the talk of truth-making is best excised from the view altogether. The result is a version of the semantic view which is better supported by the direct evidence offered for it, better equipped to achieve its avowed aims, and, I think, closer to the intentions of the original proponents of the view in many ways, despite some of their own declarations to the contrary.

A semântica como negociação dos significados em Libras

O objetivo deste artigo é problematizar algumas questões sobre o trabalho do professor/pesquisador como prática pedagógica e política (uma vez que transformadora), e situar, nessa prática, uma visão semântica da escrita de alunos surdos. Tomando como pressuposto que "o uso da linguagem é um lugar de construção dos recursos de significação", este artigo tratará de algumas reflexões sobre a língua de sinais e a semântica como negociação de significado em Libras. o foco deste artigo é a relação sintático-semântica dos verbos em língua brasileira de sinais, analisada de acordo com suas propriedades, representações e significações. Desta forma, constatamos que, "o estudo da representações semânticas dos verbos em Libras" possa mostrar que aquilo que a escrita do surdo revela é a interferência da forma de negociação das significações da língua de sinais _ cuja diferença é apontada nos exemplos estudados neste trabalho.

Representation: The Problem for Structuralism

What does it mean to embed the phenomena in an abstract structure? Or to represent them by doing so? The semantic view of theories runs into a severe problem if these notions are construed either naively, in a metaphysical way, or too closely on the pattern of the earlier syntactic view. Constructive empiricism and structural realism will then share those difficulties. The problem will be posed as in Reichenbach's The Theory of Relativity and A Priori Knowledge, and realist reactions will be examined, but they will be argued to dissolve upon scrutiny.

Computation without Representation

The received view is that computational states are individuated at least in part by their semantic properties. I offer an alternative, according to which computational states are individuated by their functional properties. Functional properties are specified by a mechanistic explanation without appealing to any semantic properties. The primary purpose of this paper is to formulate the alternative view of computational individuation, point out that it supports a robust notion of computational explanation, and defend it on the grounds of how computational states are individuated within computability theory and computer science. A secondary purpose is to show that existing arguments for the semantic view are defective.

Operational Semantics of Reversibility in Process Algebra

Reversible computation has a growing number of promising application areas such as the modelling of biochemical systems, program debugging and testing, and even programming languages for quantum computing. We discuss reversibility in major process algebras from the point of view of operational semantics. The main difficulty seems to be with the definitions of forward and reverse computation for the dynamic operators, and we confine ourselves to these, leaving the static operators for further work. We consider a solution where predicates in SOS rules play a vital role.

Shared structure need not be shared set-structure

Recent semantic approaches to scientific structuralism, aiming to make precise the concept of shared structure between models, formally frame a model as a type of set-structure. This framework is then used to provide a semantic account of (a) the structure of a scientific theory, (b) the applicability of a mathematical theory to a physical theory, and (c) the structural realist’s appeal to the structural continuity between successive physical theories. In this paper, I challenge the idea that, to be so used, the concept of a model and so the concept of shared structure between models must be formally framed within a single unified framework, set-theoretic or other. I first investigate the Bourbaki-inspired assumption that structures are types of set-structured systems and next consider the extent to which this problematic assumption underpins both Suppes’ and recent semantic views of the structure of a scientific theory. I then use this investigation to show that, when it comes to using the concept of shared structure, there is no need to agree with French that “without a formal framework for explicating this concept of ‘structure-similarity’ it remains vague, just as Giere’s concept of similarity between models does ...” (French, 2000, Synthese, 125, pp. 103–120, p. 114). Neither concept is vague; either can be made precise by appealing to the concept of a morphism, but it is the context (and not any set-theoretic type) that determines the appropriate kind of morphism. I make use of French’s (1999, From physics to philosophy (pp. 187–207). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) own example from the development of quantum theory to show that, for both Weyl and Wigner’s programmes, it was the context of considering the ‘relevant symmetries’ that determined that the appropriate kind of morphism was the one that preserved the shared Lie-group structure of both the theoretical and phenomenological models.

Models and Modelling in Physics Education: A Critical Re-analysis of Philosophical Underpinnings and Suggestions for Revisions

The model-based view (MBV) of science education, which strives for authenticity in science teaching, is currently seeking support from the philosophical positions related to the Semantic View of Theories (SVT). These recent advances are promising steps towards establishing a robust philosophical framework, but they need revision in so far as they are meant to apply to physics and physics education. It is suggested here that in physics education, attention needs to be guided to the notion of the empirical reliability of models and modelling, and to the methodological question of how empirical reliability is established in the process of making a match between theory and experiment. The suggested picture – intended for the purposes of physics teacher education – replaces the current more limited philosophical frameworks used in science education with one of a wider scope. Moreover, the revised philosophical background gives a more authentic picture of physics as science, and the modelling activity within it, than the other current stances in the science education.