A translation approach to portable ontology specifications

‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

Recent work in Artificial Intelligence is exploring the use of formal ontologies as a way of specifying content-specific agreements for the sharing and reuse of knowledge among software entities. We take an engineering perspective on the development of such ontologies. Formal ontologies are viewed as designed artifacts, formulated for specific purposes and evaluated against objective design criteria. We describe the role of ontologies in supporting knowledge sharing activities, and then present a set of criteria to guide the development of ontologies for these purposes. We show how these criteria are applied in case studies from the design of ontologies for engineering mathematics and bibliographic data. Selected design decisions are discussed, and alternative representation choices and evaluated against the design criteria.

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Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing

物件導向軟體之架構(Object-Oriented Software Construction)探討

This paper is intended to serve as a comprehensive introduction to the emerging field concerned with the design and use of ontologies. We observe that disparate backgrounds, languages, tools and techniques are a major barrier to effective communication among people, organisations and/or software understanding (i.e. an “ontology”) in a given subject area, can improve such communication, which in turn, can give rise to greater reuse and sharing, inter-operability, and more reliable software. After motivating their need, we clarify just what ontologies are and what purpose they serve. We outline a methodology for developing and evaluating ontologies, first discussing informal techniques, concerning such issues as scoping, handling ambiguity, reaching agreement and producing definitions. We then consider the benefits and describe, a more formal approach. We re-visit the scoping phase, and discuss the role of formal languages and techniques in the specification, implementation and evalution of ontologies. Finally, we review the state of the art and practice in this emerging field, considering various case studies, software tools for ontology development, key research issues and future prospects.

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Ontologies: principles, methods and applications

According to the standard wisdom, all temporal occurrences are considered as “frozen in time”. This means that all their properties are fully determined, and they can’t change. This is certainly true for historical occurrences, but, at least in the ordinary language, ongoing and future occurrences seem to admit the possibility of change: the score of an ongoing match may change in time, and a future trip may be delayed. But if ongoing and future events can change in time, what are their identifiers? In this paper I propose a tensed ontological account (contrasted with the dominant tenseless tradition) that provides an answer to this question.

On the Semantics of Ongoing and Future Occurrence Identifiers

This contribution presents an ontological model of services that describes them as complex temporal entities, constituted by interrelations of states, actions and processes, occurring in a wider service system. Our aim is to establish rigorous ontological foundations for the various basic notions of service science, including service, service system, service process, service system life-cycle, and service value co-creation. A crucial role in our approach is played by the notion of commitment, which allows us to provide a definition of service as generic commitment to guarantee the execution of value co-creation actions.

https://www.paulallen.ca/documents/2014/05/commitment-based-modeling-service-systems.pdf

Commitment-Based Modeling of Service Systems

In several subject domains, the categorization scheme itself is part of the subject matter. In this case, experts make use of categories of categories in their accounts. This has led to a number of approaches in conceptual modeling and knowledge representation that are called multi-level modeling approaches. An early approach for multi-level modeling is the powertype pattern which introduces “power types” and “base types”. More recently, other proposals for multilevel modeling include “clabjects”, “m-objects”, which admit the existence of entities being somehow, simultaneously, types (classes) and instances (usually associated to objects). Regardless of the choice of approach to perform multi-level modelling, a question remains concerning the ontological status of “base types”, “power types” and “clabjects”. This paper aims to address this question through an ontological analysis. We use here the general term powertype to generally refer to types whose instances exhibit somehow both type-like and instance-like characteristics. We examine alternative accounts for powertype instances: (i) powertype instances as universals (abstract repeatable entities), (ii) powertype instances as mereological sums of instances of an associated type and (iii) powertype instances as variable embodiments. We conclude that the latter is the most promising account for an ontological interpretation of this phenomenon that meets the modelling desiderata for powertypes present in the literature.

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Nicola Guarino

Papers

On the Semantics of Ongoing and Future Occurrence Identifiers

Commitment-Based Modeling of Service Systems

Towards an Ontological Analysis of Powertypes.

Enterprise Modelling: A Declarative Approach for FBPML

Proceedings of the International Workshop on Formal Ontology in Conceptual Analysis and Knowledge Representation