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The complex information systems which have evolved in recent decades rely on robust and coherent representations in order to function. Such representations and associated reasoning techniques constitute the modern discipline of formal ontology, which is now applied to fields such as artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, bioinformatics, GIS, conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering, information retrieval, and the semantic web. Ontologies are increasingly employed in a number of complex real-world application domains. For instance, in biology and medicine, more and more principle-based ontologies are being developed for the description of biological and biomedical phenomena. To...
Ontology was once understood to be the philosophical inquiry into the structure of reality: the analysis and categorization of ‘what there is’. Recently, however, a field called ‘ontology’ has become part of the rapidly growing research industry in information technology. The two fields have more in common than just their name. Theory and Applications of Ontology is a two-volume anthology that aims to further an informed discussion about the relationship between ontology in philosophy and ontology in information technology. It fills an important lacuna in cutting-edge research on ontology in both fields, supplying stage-setting overview articles on history and method, presenting dire...
Ontology was once understood to be the philosophical inquiry into the structure of reality: the analysis and categorization of ‘what there is’. Recently, however, a field called ‘ontology’ has become part of the rapidly growing research industry in information technology. The two fields have more in common than just their name. Theory and Applications of Ontology is a two-volume anthology that aims to further an informed discussion about the relationship between ontology in philosophy and ontology in information technology. It fills an important lacuna in cutting-edge research on ontology in both fields, supplying stage-setting overview articles on history and method, presenting dire...
"Since its start ten years ago, the International Conference in Formal Ontology on Information Systems (FOIS) has explored the multiple perspectives on the notion of ontology that have arisen from such diverse research communities as philosophy, logic, computer science, cognitive science, linguistics, and various scientific domains. As ontologies have been applied in new and exciting domains such as the World Wide Web, bioinformatics, and geographical information systems, it has become evident that there is a need for ontologies that have been developed with solid theoretical foundations based on philosophical, linguistic and logical analysis. Similarly, there is also a need for theoretical ...
th CAiSE 2004 was the 16 in the series of International Conferences on Advanced Information Systems Engineering. In the year 2004 the conference was hosted by the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Riga Technical University, Latvia. Since the late 1980s, the CAiSE conferences have provided a forum for the presentation and exchange of research results and practical experiences within the ?eld of Information Systems Engineering. The conference theme of CAiSE 2004 was Knowledge and Model Driven Information Systems Engineering for Networked Organizations. Modern businesses and IT systems are facing an ever more complex en- ronment characterized by openness, variety, and chan...
At all times physicians were bound to pursue not only medical tasks, but to reflect also on the many anthropological and metaphysical aspects of their discipline, such as on the nature of life and death, of health and sickness, and above all on the vital ethical dimensions of their practice. For centuries, almost for two millennia, how ever, those who practiced medicine lived in a relatively clearly defined ethical and implicitly philosophical or religious 'world-order' within which they could safely turn to medical practice, knowing right from wrong, or at least being told what to do and what not to do. Today, however, the situation has radically changed, mainly due to three quite different...
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 6th International Andrei Ershov Memorial Conference, PSI 2006, held in Akademgorodok, Novosibirsk, Russia in June 2006. The 30 revised full papers and 10 revised short papers presented together with 5 invited papers address all current aspects of theoretical computer science, programming methodology, and new information technologies.
This book represents the peer-reviewed proceedings of the Second International Symposium on Intelligent Distributed Computing – IDC 2008 held in Catania, Italy during September 18-19, 2008. The 35 contributions in this book address many topics related to intelligent and distributed computing, systems and applications, including: adaptivity and learning; agents and multi-agent systems; argumentation; auctions; case-based reasoning; collaborative systems; data structures; distributed algorithms; formal modeling and verification; genetic and immune algorithms; grid computing; information extraction, annotation and integration; network and security protocols; mobile and ubiquitous computing; ontologies and metadata; P2P computing; planning; recommender systems; rules; semantic Web; services and processes; trust and social computing; virtual organizations; wireless networks; XML technologies.
This book provides a complete introduction to the rapidly expanding field of Knowledge organization (KO), presenting historical precedents and theoretical foundations in a discursive, intelligible form, covering the philosophical, linguistic and technical aspects. In the contemporary context of global information exchange through linked data, Knowledge organization systems (KOS) need to be represented in standard inter-operable formats. Different formats for KOS representation including MARC, Dublin Core, SKOS and OWL are introduced as well as the application of Knowledge organization to a variety of activities and contexts: education, encyclopedic knowledge, the Internet, libraries, archive...
What Is Upper Ontology In the field of information science, an upper ontology is defined as an ontology that is made up of extremely general terms that are shared by all different types of domains. An important role of an upper ontology is to support broad semantic interoperability among a large number of domain-specific ontologies by offering a common beginning point for the formation of definitions. This is accomplished by giving a starting point that is shared by all of the ontologies in question. The terms in the domain ontology are ranked lower than the terms in the upper ontology; for instance, the classes in the upper ontology are either superclasses or supersets of all of the classes...