Ontological View Research Articles

Frame-based ontological view for semantic integration

Semantic integration is crucial for successful collaboration between heterogeneous information systems. Traditional ontology-driven approaches rely on the availability of explicit ontologies. However, in most application domains, this prerequisite cannot be met. In order to address this issue, this paper investigates the theoretical foundation of ontologies and extends the traditional ontology concept to an ontological view concept. To explicitly and formally specify the ontological views, a Frame-based Ontological view Specification Language (FOSL) is proposed. This language is based on the frame knowledge representation paradigm and uses XML as the encoding. The ontological view driven semantic integration can be achieved based on the specifications. A proof-of-concept prototype environment has been implemented to achieve semantic integration based on ontological views specified with FOSL.

Bodies as open projects: reflections on gender and sexuality

This article argues that the social constructivist paradigm falls into the same dualistic trap as biological essentialism when attempting to respond to questions of gender and sexuality. I argue that social constructivism, like biological determinism, presumes a ‘split’ world, where subjective lived experiences are separated from the world of socio-cultural forces. Following a phenomenological approach, grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s ontological view of the body, this article attempts to move beyond the dualistic metadiscourses of social constructivism in maintaining that identity is a fully embodied process. I see gender and sexuality as necessarily embodied and corporeally constituted. In the light of this, I propose an understanding of gender and sexuality that focuses on the centrality of the body as open project. This approach sees gender and sexuality as embodied processes that are enmeshed with the complex fabric of lived everyday experiences and concurrent socio-cultural and historical processes. Drawing on real-life examples, I conclude that gender and sexual embodiment are not one-dimensional according to a binary system of male versus female. Rather, given the documented experience of the indeterminacy and ambiguity of human existence, there are a variety of possible embodiments of humankind.

BODIES AT THE MARGINS: The Case of Transsexuality in Catholic and Shia Ethics

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the ways in which emerging religious understandings of sexual reassignment surgery (SRS) have potential for new work in comparative ethics. I focus on the startling diversity of teachings on transsexuality among the Vatican and leading Shia clerics in Iran. While the Vatican rejects SRS as a cure for transsexuality, Iranian clerics not only support decisions to transition to a new sex, they see it as necessary in some cases given the gendered nature of the moral life. In this essay, after describing the practical justification for sexual reassignment surgeries in Iranian fatwas and the emerging official Vatican position on transsexuality, I explain how these divergent positions are based on different semiotics of sex and gender that reflect specific ontological views of the human body.

Parallels in knowledge cycles

Knowledge management as an academic discipline is realizing phenomenal growth and international acceptance. However, there still exists no universally accepted framework or model. This paper reviews three of the most well known KM models from similar epistemological and ontological views. The three models reviewed are: Nonaka’s SECI (Japan), March’s Ex-Ex (USA) and Boisot’s I-space (Europe). A number of recommendations for future research based on the similarities and differences among these models pertaining to knowledge management are presented.

Foucault’s politicization of ontology

The paper explicates a politicized conception of reality with the help of Michel Foucault’s critical project. I contend that Foucault’s genealogies of power problematize the relationship between ontology and politics. His idea of productive power incorporates a radical, ontological claim about the nature of reality: Reality as we know it is the result of social practices and struggles over truth and objectivity. Rather than translating the true ontology into the right politics, he reverses the argument. The radicality of his method lies in showing how the ontological order of things is in itself the outcome of a political struggle: Ontology is politics that has forgotten itself. I argue that Foucault’s thought accomplishes the politicization of ontology with two key theoretical moves. The first is the contestation and provocation of all given and necessary ontological foundations. He affirms the ontological view that there is a discontinuity between reality and all ontological schemas that order it, and a subsequent indeterminacy of reason in establishing ultimate truths or foundations. After this initial step whereby ontology is denaturalized—made arbitrary or at least historically contingent—the way is open for explanations that treat the alternative and competing ontological frameworks as resulting from historical, linguistic and social practices of power. The second key move is thus the exposure of power relations and their constitutive role in our conception of reality. I conclude by considering the implications of Foucault’s politicization of ontology for our understanding of politics.

Ontology-Based Device Descriptions and Device Repository for Building Automation Devices

Device descriptions play an important role in the design and commissioning of modern building automation systems and help reducing the design time and costs. However, all established device descriptions are specialized for certain purposes and suffer from several weaknesses. This hinders a further design automation, which is strongly needed for the more and more complex building automation systems. To overcome these problems, this paper presents novel Ontology-based Device Descriptions (ODDs) along with a layered ontology architecture, a specific ontology view approach with virtual properties, a generic access interface, a triple store-based database backend, and a generic search mask GUI with underlying query generation algorithm. It enables a formal, unified, and extensible specification of building automation devices, ensures their comparability, and facilitates a computerenabled retrieval, selection, and interoperability evaluation, which is essential for an automated design. The scalability of the approach to several ten thousand devices is demonstrated.

MetNetGE: interactive views of biological networks and ontologies

BackgroundLinking high-throughput experimental data with biological networks is a key step for understanding complex biological systems. Currently, visualization tools for large metabolic networks often result in a dense web of connections that is difficult to interpret biologically. The MetNetGE application organizes and visualizes biological networks in a meaningful way to improve performance and biological interpretability.ResultsMetNetGE is an interactive visualization tool based on the Google Earth platform. MetNetGE features novel visualization techniques for pathway and ontology information display. Instead of simply showing hundreds of pathways in a complex graph, MetNetGE gives an overview of the network using the hierarchical pathway ontology using a novel layout, called the Enhanced Radial Space-Filling (ERSF) approach that allows the network to be summarized compactly. The non-tree edges in the pathway or gene ontology, which represent pathways or genes that belong to multiple categories, are linked using orbital connections in a third dimension. Biologists can easily identify highly activated pathways or gene ontology categories by mapping of summary experiment statistics such as coefficient of variation and overrepresentation values onto the visualization. After identifying such pathways, biologists can focus on the corresponding region to explore detailed pathway structure and experimental data in an aligned 3D tiered layout. In this paper, the use of MetNetGE is illustrated with pathway diagrams and data from E. coli and Arabidopsis.ConclusionsMetNetGE is a visualization tool that organizes biological networks according to a hierarchical ontology structure. The ERSF technique assigns attributes in 3D space, such as color, height, and transparency, to any ontological structure. For hierarchical data, the novel ERSF layout enables the user to identify pathways or categories that are differentially regulated in particular experiments. MetNetGE also displays complex biological pathway in an aligned 3D tiered layout for exploration.

Why Conceptual Rigour Matters to Philosophy: on the Ontological Significance of Algebraic Quantum Field Theory

I argue that algebraic quantum field theory (AQFT) permits an undisturbed view of the right ontology for fundamental physics, whereas standard (or Lagrangian) QFT offers different mutually incompatible ontologies. My claim does not depend on the mathematical inconsistency of standard QFT but on the fact that AQFT has the same concerns as ontology, namely categorical parsimony and a clearly structured hierarchy of entities.

Instance-based domain ontological view creation towards semantic integration

In many domains today there are very limited explicit ontologies established for implementing information systems. Traditional ontology-driven semantic integration approaches cannot be directly applied in integrating these information systems. Usually, the information systems have schemas, a type of formal information model, for their information repositories which to some extent imply the semantics of the information. Each schema actually reflects a specific view of the domain conceptualization. This paper investigates the theoretical foundation of ontologies and extends the traditional ontology concept to the ontological view concept. It proposes to use ontological views to address the challenge of semantic integration. The proposed approach adopts the schemas to create local ontological views, uses data instances of the information systems to discover semantic relationships between the concepts within the ontological views, and builds a domain ontological view based on the discovered equivalence mappings. It applies the hierarchical clustering technique on the data instances and, in the further analysis, uses the clusters to reduce the cost of processing a large amount of data. The matching of concept properties is based on the probability distribution of the data instances. The experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach.

On An Ontological View Of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is an architecture for providing computing service via the Internet. Use of the term “cloud” is a metaphor for the representation of the Internet used in most systems diagrams. In this case, the Internet is the transport mechanism between a client and a server located somewhere in cyberspace, as compared to having computer applications residing on an “on premises” computer. Adoption of cloud computing practically eliminates two ongoing problems in IT service provisioning: the upfront costs of acquiring computational resources and the time delay of building and deploying software applications. This paper gives an ontological view of the subject in order to serve as a point of reference in the discipline and to facilitate ongoing technical development.

Modeling sample variables with an Experimental Factor Ontology

Motivation: Describing biological sample variables with ontologies is complex due to the cross-domain nature of experiments. Ontologies provide annotation solutions; however, for cross-domain investigations, multiple ontologies are needed to represent the data. These are subject to rapid change, are often not interoperable and present complexities that are a barrier to biological resource users.Results: We present the Experimental Factor Ontology, designed to meet cross-domain, application focused use cases for gene expression data. We describe our methodology and open source tools used to create the ontology. These include tools for creating ontology mappings, ontology views, detecting ontology changes and using ontologies in interfaces to enhance querying. The application of reference ontologies to data is a key problem, and this work presents guidelines on how community ontologies can be presented in an application ontology in a data-driven way.Availability: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/efoContact: malone@ebi.ac.ukSupplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Investigating the use of social networking site in an ESL writing class

This paper presents a case study that examined the use of one of the Web 2.0 services, a social networking site (SNS), in an adult ESL writing class. The main purpose of this study is to investigate and describe how the SNS was implemented, and how the students perceived its use for their learning. Data were collected over a five-month period, including classroom observations, online artifacts, and interviews with the instructor and the seven ESL students. Drawing on activity theory (Leontiev, 1981) and situated learning theory (Lave & Wenger, 1991), the researcher analyzed factors that contributed to the unsuccessful use of the SNS in this particular writing class. The findings of this study show the major conflicts that existed between the English teacher and the ESL students in terms of their ontological views on learning, which resulted in reducing the students’ sense of achievement, belonging, and recognition in the process of learning to write with the SNS. The educational implications for using Web 2.0 services in L2 classes have been discussed.

Knowledge, risk and Beck: Misconceptions of expertise and risk

Ulrich Beck's work is beginning to alter how risk is understood. This paper maps out the core of Beck's argument and provides a critique of his analysis. In particular it argues that this emerging concept of risk is flawed because it is not rooted in an ontological view of knowledge and, hence, it misunderstands the relationship between experts, expert knowledge and lay knowledge. Because of his downgrading of ontology, Beck under-theorizes the politics of expertise and the sociality of knowledge hence we should be cautious in our use of his analysis of risk and organization in late modernity. It has been said civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. With Katrina, we have had the catastrophe, and we are racing inexorably toward the next. Americans want to know; what have we learned? ( US Select Bipartisan Committee, 2006 ; ix)

Completing an Unfinished Jigsaw Puzzle: Cornelis Van Vollenhoven and the Study of International Law

This paper examines the views of the Dutch lawyer and philologist Cornelis van Vollenhoven (1874-1933) on how to study law and international law in particular. Van Vollenhoven assessed that international law was in a state of uncertainty and inchoateness which it was the lawyer’s obligation to transcend. Since most textbooks, with or without good reason, fail to mention him, Van Vollenhoven is one of those striking personalities one is likely to have heard about as an international legal historian but who remains nothing but a casual acquaintance nonetheless. This paper primarily sets out to elaborate on Van Vollenhoven’s ontological and epistemological views on international law thus shedding light on some aspects of his thought and writings that have not received the attention they deserve yet. Van Vollenhoven was both involved in scholarly work on international law and left behind various publications on legal methodology. The scholar willing to dig into his collected writings comes across a rather eclectic and hence probably unique though not highly original approach to the study of law. His endauvour to classify jurisprudence among the exact sciences combined with some of his political positions on international order and the law of the Dutch East Indies resulted in an empiricist, evolutionist, and institutionalist perspective according to which a scientific approach to international law boils down to the combination of three methods: a systematic, a historical, and a comparative one. This paper aims at providing a sketch of that approach.

Determinação, história e materialidade

O ensaio critica algumas modalidades de determinismo atualmente dominantes, fugindo do pensamento aleatório ou pós-moderno. Procuramos contribuir para a explicação objetiva, porém sensível, do mundo, de modo a manter aberta a intervenção efetiva e consciente no processo histórico. O argumento apresenta a contraposição paradoxal e dolorosa entre determinismo econômico e uma liberdade amputada que o acompanha e, em seguida, mostra como a reflexão marxiana permite superar os impasses nos quais recaíram tanto os deterministas naturalistas quanto os antideterministas pós-modernos. Essa superação exige a demonstração da historicidade constitutiva do processo de trabalho, tanto no seu viés ontológico (Lukacs) quanto no viés histórico (Marx), apontando para a materialidade efetiva das relações sociais como forma de distribuição dos seres singulares no conjunto das atividades da produção de sua existência social. Concluímos mostrando como a determinação, em Marx, não é redutora e, portanto, não repousa sobre um econômico entificado.

Beyond Newspeak: three arguments for the persistence of the informal in the creation and use of computational ontologies

The creation and use of computational ontologies that represent a wide variety of information sources has been an assumed necessity for communication on the Semantic Web. Embedded in this necessity comes the challenge of to codify or to collaborate. The codify view fits very well with an objectivist view of knowledge management and with the current use of computational ontologies as an engineering artifact. The collaborate view, is more aligned with a philosophical view of ontology, mostly from a hermeneutical perspective based on the work of Heidegger. Computational ontologies are limited by the condition of consistency and work well on communication within a single perspective. On the other hand, ontology from a hermeneutical perspective is explicitly useful in speaking across perspectives. The view that we hold in this paper is that both are important and complementary to each other. We frame our discussion of to codify or to collaborate in terms the Tower of Babel problem and the ensuing Newspeak solution. The need to allow multiple, and sometimes incompatible, models to coexist leads to the Tower of Babel problem. A solution to this problem would be the creation of a new language, simpler and less capable of expressing different perspectives, Newspeak. We also give an explanation of the importance of the tacit in all communication and we give three arguments for the persistence of the informal. We conclude that the process of reflective reasoning described here is the context in play when in the appropriate use of consistent computational ontologies, as well as being the foundation of collaborative communicative enterprises.

The concept of ‘functional dependency’

Introduction: In Europe the concepts of ‘functioning/disability’ and ‘autonomy/dependency’ deserve special interest from the point of view of medical ontology. While Functioning/Disability are concepts defined at the WHO International Classification of Functioning (ICF), the autonomy/dependency pair is not even mentioned at this classification system.

Kesadaran Intuitif Plus Cahaya Ilahiyah; Husserl di Muka Cermin Suhrawardi

Husserl has introduced intuitive consciousness in order to see directly the complexity and reality without devise and perspective. In Western thought, Husserl’s view is considered as strange up to the present time. The basic problem of Suhrawardi is similar with Husserl, indeed validity of knowledge, in which the only authority is at the Peripatetic logic. The main characteristics of this scientific model are the truth of syllogism, proposition, concept and problem of definition. This article tries to relate between Husserl’s view on intuitionalism and Suhrawardi’s view on illumination, even still based on preliminary experiment. The unity of Husserl and Suhrawardi seems to be gigantic power. “Intuitionalism under the light of God.” Can be an alternative. On the other hand, it also may be as a solution for the ontological view on reality which nowadays tend to be materialistic and mechanical. The view of this mechanical materialistic factually raises various crises on the modern life. Ontologically, the light of Intuitionalism can be the basis of the development of thought at different aspects of life, such as ethic, esthetic, anthropology, epistemology, etc.

AN INFERENCE-ENABLED ACCESS CONTROL MODEL FOR RDF ONTOLOGY

Although RDF ontologies are expressed based on XML syntax, existing methods to protect XML documents are not suitable for securing RDF ontologies. The graph style and inference feature of RDF ontologies demands new methods for access control. Driven by this goal, this paper proposes a query-oriented model for RDF ontology access control. The model adopts the concept of ontology view to rewrite user queries. In our approach, ontology views define accessible ontology concepts and instances a user can visit, and enables a controlled inference capability for the user. The design of the views guarantees that the views are free of conflict. Based on that, the paper describes algorithms for rewriting queries according to different views, and provides a system architecture along with an implemented prototype. In the evaluation, the system exhibits a promising result in terms of effectiveness and soundness.

Learning and inferencing in user ontology for personalized Semantic Web search

User modeling is aimed at capturing the users’ interests in a working domain, which forms the basis of providing personalized information services. In this paper, we present an ontology based user model, called user ontology, for providing personalized information service in the Semantic Web. Different from the existing approaches that only use concepts and taxonomic relations for user modeling, the proposed user ontology model utilizes concepts, taxonomic relations, and non-taxonomic relations in a given domain ontology to capture the users’ interests. As a customized view of the domain ontology, a user ontology provides a richer and more precise representation of the user’s interests in the target domain. Specifically, we present a set of statistical methods to learn a user ontology from a given domain ontology and a spreading activation procedure for inferencing in the user ontology. The proposed user ontology model with the spreading activation based inferencing procedure has been incorporated into a semantic search engine, called OntoSearch, to provide personalized document retrieval services. The experimental results, based on the ACM digital library and the Google Directory, support the efficacy of the user ontology approach to providing personalized information services.