Ontology of Language

This article proposes an ontological approach to the distinction between truth and falsehood, shifting the debate from moral and epistemic registers to the material plane of language. Drawing on a critical reading of metaphysical traditions-from Plato to Kant-and their contemporary crisis, the text argues that truth is not a static property but a degree of exposure to the real, measured by the symbolic reorganization that occurs in response to friction. Falsehood, in turn, is treated as a structural possibility of language, characterized by the suspension of proof and temporal economy. The distinction between truth and fiction is explored through its temporal, ethical, and political dimensions, engaging with the Ontology of Emerging Complexity, pragmatist philosophy, and critiques of symbolic acceleration. The article defends that to think today is to inhabit friction, resist performative efficacy, and cultivate institutions capable of sustaining the duration required for proof.

Semantic Web Services are a research effort to automate the usage of Web services, a necessary component for the Semantic Web. Traditionally, Web service discovery depends on detailed formal semantic descriptions of available services. Since a complete detailed service description is not always feasible, the client software cannot select the best service offer for a given user goal only by using the static service descriptions. Therefore the client needs to interact automatically with the discovered Web services to find information about the available concrete offers, after which it can select the best offer that will fulfill the user's goal. This paper shows when and why complete semantic description is unfeasible, it defines the role and position of offer discovery, and it suggests how it can be implemented and evaluated.

Ontologies implemented in RDF(S)‚ DAML+OIL‚ and OWL should be evaluated from the point of view of knowledge representation before using them in Semantic Web applications. Several language-dependent ontology validation tools and ontology platforms‚ such as OilEd with FaCT‚ can be used in order to evaluate RDF(S)‚ DAML+OIL and OWL ontologies. This paper offers two main contributions. The first of these exams whether previous ontology tools detect knowledge representation problems in RDF(S)‚ DAML+OIL‚ and OWL concept taxonomies. Indeed‚ such tools do not focus on detecting inconsistencies and redundancies in concept taxonomies. The second contribution is ODEval‚ a language-dependent tool for evaluating‚ from the point of view of knowledge representation‚ concept taxonomies in ontologies implemented in such languages. ODEval complements previous ontology tools when we want to evaluate RDF(S)‚ DAML+OIL‚ and OWL concept taxonomies.

In this paper we review and compare the main methodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies that have been reported in the literature, as well as the main relationships among them. Ontology technology is nowadays mature enough: many methodologies, tools and languages are already available. The future work in this field should be driven towards the creation of a common integrated workbench for ontology developers to facilitate ontology development, exchange, evaluation, evolution and management, to provide methodological support for these tasks, and translations to and from different ontology languages. This workbench should not be created from scratch, but instead integrating the technology components that are currently available.

Davidsonian event semantics has become immensely influential in contemporary natural language semantics. On that view, all events (including acts and states) are considered the same ontologically, i.e., Davidsonian particulars, and they all serve as arguments of verbs and corresponding nominalizations. We argue that that view has to be rejected both ontologically and on the level of compositional semantics. We argue that natural language reflects two related ontological distinctions: first a distinction between base events (BE) and plan events (PE) (which are based on plans or procedures); second a distinction between acts and intentional acts. We propose an ontological account of PEs and intentional acts based on Fine's notion of a qua object: a PE is a BE qua realizing a plan and an intentional act is an act qua realizing an intention. The BE-PE distinction manifests itself in existence predicates for events and predicates of participation (take part in, participate, be part of). Unlike Fine, we allow properties of qua events to be inherited not only from their base (temporal part structure), but also from their gloss, namely as a 'slot mereology' consisting of plan-specific roles, which can be specified for particular individuals or be open. Whereas the ordinary noun part (as in the parts of) picks out parts of the former part structure, the light noun part in the predicates take part in and be part of picks out roles inherited from the plan. Whereas take part in can relate to both specified and open roles, be part of can only target specified roles. The distinction between BEs and PEs is encoded in lexical semantics only; the distinction between acts and intentional acts is also encoded in syntax, in the presence of a silent operator. This requires a more complex form of event semantics than standard Davidsonian semantics.

In this paper we propose the Fire system, a prototype rule engine for reasoning with SWRL (Semantic Web Rules Language) rules and OWL (Ontology Web Language) ontologies. This system is intended as an extension to the reasoning services of the RACER system . For ease of implementation, support is currently provided for SWRL rules that are restricted as follows: (i) Rules must be atomic (single atom in the rule consequent); (ii) Rules must have tree-shaped antecedents; (iii) Rules must be 'strictly Horn' (predicates of rule atoms may only be 'name' of property or class); (iv) SWRL built-ins, sameAs, differentFrom or OWL DatatypeProperty may not be used for predicates in rule atoms. The Fire system is implemented in Java in the following way; Rules defined in the ontology are extracted using Protégé's SWRL API . Facts asserted in and entailed by the ontology are obtained from RACER. The RETE algorithm [1, 2] is implemented for 'pattern matching' these facts with patterns in rule antecedents. Materialization of rules for which instantiations/bindings are provided by the pattern matcher, is done by synchronizing with RACER's inferences. Simple 'random selection' strategy is applied in resolving the conflict when more than one 'new' rule instantiation is provided at the same time. The reasoning process terminates when no 'new' inference is found compared to the already 'known' facts (asserted, entailed or new inferences from rules materialized earlier). Reasoning is offered in two modes, based on the number of rule instantiations considered during materialization for a given state of the knowledge base; (i) One-at-a-time mode: 'one' rule instantiation for an applicable rule at a time, and (ii) Batch mode: 'all' rule instantiations for all applicable rules at once in a batch. Our initial results of Fire's performance over example SWRL ontologies have been very encouraging. We are currently working on several open issues to optimize Fire's performance and extend its services: (i) Extend support for use of OWLDatatypeProperty, sameAs and different-From predicates in rules; (ii) Optimize construction of the RETE pattern network by exploiting the common predicates generally existing among different rules; (iii) Use the publish-subscribe mechanism from RACER to efficiently learn about the changes (newly asserted/inferred instantiations) made to any concept in the ontology that is relevant for rule reasoning; (iv) Provide Fire as a plug-in support for Protégé's SWRL Tab; (v) Integrate an optimized version of Fire as a rule engine for nRQL (new Racer Query Language) rules [4] into the RACER system.

Verbs in European languages do not come with a morphosyntactic mass-count distinction. Yet it has become customary to apply a semantic mass-count distinction to the verbal domain of events as well. This, however, is not unproblematic, since the verbal domain of events in fact behaves like a classifier system, rather than dividing into mass and count. This can be accounted for on an emerging view of the mass-count distinction according to which countability is not an integral part of lexical meaning, but is ‘added on’ or ‘made available’, whether syntactically, semantically or both. The paper discusses a range of data, partly from German, that support such a grammar-based view of countability for verbs with respect to the event argument position as well as for other non-nominal domains.

This paper proposes to present a (structural) ontology of the relationship from the articulation between form, content and structure. Reexamining fundamental concepts of logic and semantics, such as proposition, meaning and truth, the text argues that form and content do not constitute autonomous domains, but functional moments of the same structural complex. Truth is conceived as an identity between logical operator, proposition and fact [ T(p) ⮂ F ], which implies an integration between the syntactic, semantic and ontological levels of language. Drawing inspiration from Bourbaki's (and Puntel's) notion of structure and developing a relational metaphysics, the essay argues that everything that can be thought, said, or known constitutes a relation. Form rules, content determines, and complex structures; Being thus manifests itself as a network of disjunctive metaphysical intervals between distinct terms. Logic, semantics, and ontology are not separated, but converge within a single relational network of the real.

In this paper the Web Ontology Language (OWL) is examined to instantiate expert system knowledge bases intended for semantic Web applications. In particular, OWL is analyzed for expressing Unified Modeling Language (UML) representations that have been augmented with propositional logic asserted as inter-link constraints. The motivation is ultimately to provide declarative propositional logic constraints that can be represented in UML and declaratively implemented using OWL and other constructs to realize semantic Web knowledge base repositories and databases to facilitate expert system applications. The results of this paper show that OWL is sufficient for capturing most inter-link constraints asserted on generalization=specialization instances; however, OWL alone is inadequate for representing some inter-link constraints asserted on associations. We propose enhancements to OWL via RDF extensions for the reification of associations into classes. These extensions mitigate all concerns that were identified in OWL as part of this study. The result is increased support of declarative constraint representations, which can be expressed in knowledge bases in the context of the semantic Web.

Exploiting Web Service Semantics: Taxonomies vs. Ontologies Asuman Dogac, Gokce Laleci, Yildiray Kabak, Ibrahim Cingil Software Research and Development Center Middle East Technical University (METU) 06531 Ankara Turkiye email: asuman@ srdc. metu. edu. tr ...

We outline work performed within the framework of a current EC project. The goal is to construct a language-independent information system for a specific domain (environment/ecology/biodiversity) anchored in a language-independent ontology that is linked to wordnets in seven languages. For each language, information extraction and identification of lexicalized concepts with ontological entries is carried out by text miners (" Kybots"). The mapping of language-specific lexemes to the ontology allows for ...

Fictional objects are frequently considered nonexistent objects. This talk elaborates a distinction between fictional objects, which, as parts of abstract artifacts that are fictions, are existing objects, and intentional objects, which have the status as non-existents and are 'automatically' generated by the mere performance of unsuccessful or pretend acts of reference

The COntext INterchange (COIN) strategy is an approach to solving the problem of interoperability of semantically heterogeneous data sources through context mediation. COIN has used its own notation and syntax for representing ontologies. More recently, the OWL Web Ontology Language is becoming established as the W3C recommended ontology language. We propose the use of the COIN strategy to solve context disparity and ontology interoperability problems in the emerging Semantic Webboth at the ontology level and at the data level. In conjunction with this, we propose a version of the COIN ontology model that uses OWL and the emerging rules interchange language, RuleML.

Myths prove to be a unique and indispensable tool for ordering the world and situating human beings within it. Philosophy attains self-awareness precisely by distinguishing itself from myth. One of its tasks is to demonstrate its capacity to transcend reality as such, and, in particular, reality conceived as the realm of myth. This, however, requires the construction of its own philosophical theory. The author assumes that myths strive to reach a relatively leastconditioned order, while remaining within the bounds of the world. This order possesses very specific properties: it is composed of powers and persons whose activity is so extensive and profound that it may be described as absolutely foundational. Myths explain the formation of the world by relating what is later and more relativized to what is earlier and less relativized.

For those raised on Tarski, Quine and Davidson, Rescher's (1962) proof that one quantifier could not be reduced to the universal and existential quantifiers was a shock. First-order logic could not be a complete account of the inferential structure of natural languages.
A Davidsonian truth-definition cannot be an adequate account of understanding a language.
But whether or not a first-order logic is the form of a natural language, the fundamental Davidsonian idea that there must be a truth-definitional algorithm that explains much of a speaker's understanding of new sentences is correct. Language must have compositional structure delivering truth-conditions.
Davidson's project was to first systematically translate English (for instance) into  a first-order logical theory and then apply Tarski's truth-definition for first order logic to get an indirect truth-definition for English.
I illustrate how a direct Tarskian truth-definition, without the detour through first-order logic would work for the predicate "most." The constants in the proposed theory are all structural.  None are "logical constants." Truth-preserving inference patterns are special to particular predicates.

Rescher (1962) and the Semantics of "Most"
For those raised on Tarski, Quine and Davidson, Rescher's (1962) proof that one quantifier could not be reduced to the universal and existential quantifiers was a shock. First-order logic could not be a complete account of the inferential structure of natural languages. Rescher's argument that the truth-preserving inference from "Most C's are A's" and "Most C's are B's" to "Some A's are B's" could not be analyzed in terms of "all" and "some" showed that the Davidsonian project could not succeed.
But whether or not a first-order logic was the form of a natural language, the fundamental Davidsonian idea that there must be a truth-definitional algorithm that explains much of a speaker's understanding of new sentences was still compelling. Language must have compositional structure.
This paper presents the outline of a direct Tarskian semantics for English and illustrates it by how it handles "most." A "direct" Tarskian semantics is not via first-order paraphrase, but has solely constants defining structure. All truth-preserving inference patterns are consequences of theories special to particular vocabulary items not to constants of the truth-definition.

Contextual ontologies are ontologies that characterize a concept by a set of properties that vary according to context. Contextual ontologies are now crucial for users who intend to exchange information in a domain. Existing ontology languages are not capable of defining such type of ontologies. The objective of this paper is to formally define a contextual ontology language to support the development of contextual ontologies. In this paper, we use description logics as an ontology language and then we extend it by introducing a new contextual constructor.

Rescher (1964) showed that “most” could not be reduced to the universal and existential quantifiers, effectively disproving the idea that semantics can be indirect truth-definition by paraphrase into first-order quantification theory. But a truth-definition, according to a footnote added in 1984 to “Truth and Meaning” must be a modal theory, supporting counterfactuals about the truth-conditions a speaker’s merely possible utterances would have. A subjunctive truth-definition, with predication supplemented by two complex predicate-formation primitives devices and a propositional function abstraction operator, both adapted from Stalnaker’s work, yields a theory of semantic form that is directly Tarskian. The truth-conditions of every expression in the object-language is given by an expression in the meta-language. The theory involves no paraphrase.
We apply that theory to comparative predicates, including the quantifiers “much” and “many,” their comparative “more,” and their superlative “most.” “More” is a dual quantifier of which “most” is the general case. “Most” is a most interesting adverbial predicate, with applications beyond modifying a propositional function to yield a quantifier phrase.

Abstract of “Rescher (1964) and the semantics of `Most’” with five or so words

Samuel C. Wheeler III
Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
University of Connecticut
860 429 9804; samuel.wheeler@uconn.edu

Rescher (1964) showed that “most” could not be reduced to the universal and existential quantifiers, effectively disproving the idea that semantics can be indirect truth-definition by paraphrase into first-order quantification theory. But a truth-definition, according to a footnote added in 1984 to “Truth and Meaning” must be a modal theory, supporting counterfactuals about the truth-conditions a speaker’s merely possible utterances would have. A subjunctive truth-definition, with predication supplemented by two complex predicate-formation primitives devices and a propositional function abstraction operator, both adapted from Stalnaker’s work, yields a theory of semantic form that is directly Tarskian. The truth-conditions of every expression in the object-language is given by an expression in the meta-language. The theory involves no paraphrase.
We apply that theory to comparative predicates, including the quantifiers “much” and “many,” their comparative “more,” and their superlative “most.” “More” is a dual quantifier of which “most” is the general case. “Most” is a most interesting adverbial predicate, with applications beyond modifying a propositional function to yield a quantifier phrase.

In this recent technological world, it is necessary that we get accustomed to all types of advanced technological techniques. In the process, we are becoming more aware about database and information system. But what is database system information? The Database Management System which works through the storing of data can be used any time. The importance of database and information Systems in modern business is inevitable. In this chapter, we define Information Systems by its categories of Information System, type and the usefulness for efficient Information System. Then, we will proceed to explaining the management of information systems by taking a short look at its history and list some of its domains of application. After that, we define the relation between Information Systems and database. Finally, we will explore the problem of storage and some issues related to information systems and databases.

An important issue is to know whether Web ontology languages, meet the expected requirements of expressiveness and reasoning. This paper aims at contributing to this question in evaluating and comparing several languages. After describing the needs of a Semantic Web in medicine, it analyses Protégé and DAML+OIL primitives on a concrete medical ontology, the brain cortex anatomy ontology. It draws conclusions about the requirements that a Web ontology language should meet for the representation of medical taxonomy and axioms. The expressiveness of DAML+OIL or OWL DL seems suited to describe the complex taxonomic knowledge. But rules are required for representing the deductive knowledge (dependencies between relations) and to support several tasks (ontology construction, maintenance, verification, query of heterogeneous distributed information sources). Finally, the paper evaluates the features of the next standard OWL and of an hybrid language CARIN-ALN with respect to these requirements.

Thinker statues form a fascinating, but little explored cultural theme. While we may be most familiar with Rodin's thinker, thinker statues, both male and female, appear in many very diverse cultures. They include appearances in Roman art, the pensive bodhisattvas of Korea and China, the pensive Christ statues of Eastern Europe and Italy, the thinker statues of Kazakhstan and Africa, as well as the female thinkers of the pre-Columbian Tumaco-La Tolita culture. What is common among all the thinker statues despite their different cultural and religious background is that they incorporate a mental attitude, thinking...
See https://blog.oup.com/2025/03/a-thinker-and-her-thought/

In this series of articles, the author analyses epistemological and ontological developments of a human being, in particular, development of an 'I' within each of us. It is postulated that each overall 'I' is an energy exchange reservoir, that is constantly interacting with infinite variety of other environmental fields, and thus itself undergoing continuous metamorphosis, exhibiting no defining characteristics for either its brain or body that are unchanged even for an instant. Thus, each 'I', is not a product, nor an entity that we all believe as remaining unchanged within each of us all through the life. Rather, it is a process -a long process running all through the lifeconnecting infinite states of an emerging overall 'I' from instant to instant, exhibiting innumerable avatars of 'duality' between the two extremes of a wave and a particle. Each said avatar comes into being only at the instant of an actualization interaction with an environment, which otherwise remains non-existent. The study concludes, perplexingly and painfully, that each 'I' is as much a quantum-like process as that of an atomic particle.

Current efforts in the biomedical ontology community focus on establishing interoperability and data integration. In covering human diseases, one of the major international standards in clinical practice is the International Classification for Diseases (ICD), maintained by the World Health Organization (WHO). Several countryand language-specific adaptations exist which share the general structure of the WHO version but differ in certain details. This complicates the exchange of patient records and hampers data integration across language borders. We present our approach for modeling the hierarchy of the ICD-10 using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). Our model captures the hierarchical information of the ICD-10 as well as comprehensive class labels for English and German. Specialties such as “Exclusion” statements, which make statements about the disjointness of certain ICD-10 categories, are modeled in a formal way. For properties which exceed the expressivity of OWL-DL, we provide a...

The modelling of agriculture with ontologies has been of interest to many authors in the past years. However, no research, currently, has focused on building a knowledge base ontology for the Climate Smart Agriculture (CSA) domain. This study attempts to fill this gap through the development of a Climate Smart Agriculture Ontology (OntoCSA). Information was gathered from secondary sources including websites, published research articles and reports as well as related ontologies, to formalize the OntoCSA ontology in Description Logics (DLs). The OntoCSA ontology was developed in Web Ontology Language (OWL) with Protégé. Furthermore, the OntoCSA ontology was successfully validated with the HermiT reasoner within Protégé. The resulting OntoCSA ontology is a machine-readable model of CSA that can be leveraged in web-based applications for the storage, open and automated access and sharing of CSA information/data, for research and dissemination of best practices

This is a handout of a talk given at the workshop 'Part-Whole Structure and its Reflection in Natural Language' at the Université Côte d'Azur (January 23-24, 2025). The talk gives an informal, critical overview of notions of a whole that have been used or are relevant for natural language semantics: the notion of an atom in extensional mereology (Link 1983 and subsequent work), the notion of an integrated whole (and the mereotopological notion of an R-integrated whole) (Moltmann 1997, 1998 and subsequent work), and a (new) notion of a whole that is prior to the parts.

We outline work performed within the framework of a current EC project. The goal is to construct a language-independent information system for a specific domain (environment/ecology/biodiversity) anchored in a language-independent ontology that is linked to wordnets in seven languages. For each language, information extraction and identification of lexicalized concepts with ontological entries is carried out by text miners (" Kybots"). The mapping of language-specific lexemes to the ontology allows for ...

Semistructured data has become prevalent in both web applications and database systems. This rapid growth in use makes the design of good semistructured data essential. Formal semantics and automated reasoning tools enable us to reveal the inconsistencies in a semistructured data model and its instances. The Object Relationship Attribute model for Semistructured data (ORA-SS) is a graphical notation for designing and representing semistructured data. This paper presents a methodology of encoding the semantics of ORA-SS in the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and automatically validating the semistructured data design using the OWL reasoning tool -RACER. Our methodology provides automated consistency checking of an ORA-SS data model at both the schema and instance levels.

The interest in the use of ontologies for creating more intelligent and effective enterprise information systems has increased considerably in recent years. The most critical aspects during the development of these systems are: (1) to identify the ontology concepts and (2) to make explicit the business rules by means of the ontology axioms. In order to address these issues, mappings of business rules expressions to ontology statements based on different languages were proposed. Despite the efforts made in this area, some work remain to be done. This work presents a set of ontology design patterns providing a way to obtain an OWL/SWRL ontology by applying metamodel transformation rules over the SBVR specification of a business domain. Patterns are rooted in the structural specification of the standards, providing a set of mappings readily usable for business people or developers concerned with the implementation of a mapping tool. Moreover, translations from SBVR to SWRL language are presented in order to fill the gap in the expressive power of SBVR and OWL. The theoretical expressions of patterns are illustrated by means of an example depicting the core structure of a fictitious company.

Conditional Questions (CQs), structures such as If it's raining, will Joanna leave? pose a puzzle: they look like conditionals, but are interpreted like questions. Existing accounts in the literature all take the surface form of CQs at face value and treat them as matrix conditionals scoping over a question, and thus must employ sophisticated semantic machinery to produce a question meaning out of them (Isaacs and Rawlins 2008; Ciardelli et al. 2019). We develop and argue for an alternative theory on which CQs are, despite surface appearance, underlyingly matrix questions scoping over a conditional. The input to semantic interpretation is obtained as a result of syntactic reconstruction of the if-clause under the question-an independently needed mechanism. The theory does not necessitate any sophisticated semantics to handle CQs, and we show that it makes correct predictions with respect to diagnostics for reconstruction that surfacesyntax accounts don't make. We also argue that the extra semantic machinery employed by previous accounts is harmful in being at risk of over-generating unattested structures, a problem avoided by our account which only makes use of conservative semantics for CQs.

I discuss the predicate classifications based on event logic, with focus on the stative meanings. The distinction between Davidsonian states (D-states) and Kimian states (K-states) alias abstract states is currently accepted for verbal predicates, while some proponents of the neo-davidsonian analysis claim that there is no K/D distinction for the copular predicates, at least, in the European languages, where canonic copular constructions do not describe dynamic situations with an agentive subject.  I concur with Silvagni (2021) against Maienborn (2019) and argue that the K/D distinction is universal and does depend on morphosyntax. Slavic languages contribute to this debate by productive class of copular predicatives lacking the agreement morphology. These predicative have standard features diagnostic of internal D-states, i.e. D-states associated with an animate experiential subject. Internal D-states cannot be observed from the outside. Meanwhile, they have outward diagnostics that is observable. The verb SEE in a combination with internal D-states, i. e. 'I SEE THAT YOU ARE ANGRY/ HUNGRY' changes its semantics and is used in the derived meaning 'to realise', therefore, the corresponding test sentences are sensu stricto not perceptual reports.

Due to their powerful knowledge representation formalism and associated inference mechanisms, ontology-based approaches have been increasingly adopted to formally represent domain knowledge. We propose the use of ontologies to advance knowledge-sharing on underutilized crops and propose how to integrate those ontologies with rules for added expressiveness. We first present a survey on the use of ontologies in the field of life-sciences with emphasis on crop-related ontologies, and justify why we need a new formalism. We then present the UC-ONTO (an Underutilized Crops Ontology) as a case study showing the integration of OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontologies with Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) rules for added expressiveness.

This paper gives a semantic analysis of 'completion-related verbs of absence' such as 'lack' and 'be missing' in English. The analysis is based on the notion of a conceptual (integrated or ideal) whole, the notion of a variable object and its variable parts, and an ontology of 'lacks' as entities whose satisfaction involves parts. The semantics will be embedded into that of object-based truthmaker semantics of modals (Moltmann 2008, 2024).

The advancement of healthcare towards P5 medicine requires communication and cooperation between all actors and institutions involved. Interoperability must go beyond integrating data from different sources and include the understanding of the meaning of the data in the context of concepts and contexts they represent for a specific use case. In other words, we have to advance from data sharing through sharing semantics up to sharing clinical and medical knowledge. According to the Good Modeling Best Practices, we have to start with describing the real-world business system by domain experts using Domain Ontologies before transforming it into an information and communication technology (ICT) system, thereafter specifying the informational components and then transforming the system into an implementable solution. Any representation style -in the system development process acc. to ISO 10746 called system view -is defined by a related ontology, to be distinguished from real-world domain ontologies representing the knowledge spaces of involved disciplines. The system enabling such representational transformation shall also support versioning as well as the management of historical evolutions. One of such systems is the Common Terminology Service Release 2 (CTS2), which is a standard that allows the complete management of terminological contents. The main objective of this work is to present the choices we made to transform an ontology, written in the standard Ontology Web Language (OWL), into the CTS2 objects. We tested our transformation approach with the Alzheimer's Disease Ontology. We managed to map all the elements of the considered ontology to CTS2 terminological resources, except for a subset of elements such as the equivalentClass derived from restrictions on other classes.

Geospatial ontologies have a key role to play in the development of the geospatial-Semantic Web, with regard to facilitating the search for geographical information and resources. They normally hold large volumes of geographic information and undergo a continuous process of revision and update. Limitations of the OWL ontology representation language for supporting geospatial domains are discussed and an integrated rule and ontology language is recognized as needed to support the representation and reasoning requirements in this domain. A survey of the current approaches to integrating ontologies and rules is presented and a new framework is proposed that is based on and extends Description Logic Programs. A hybrid representational approach is adopted where the logical component of the framework is used to represent geographical concepts and spatial rules and an external computational geometry processor is used for storing and manipulating the associated geometric data. A sample application is used to demonstrate the proposed language and engine and how they address the identified challenges.

According to Kurt Godel [1] , the argument that the human mind is a Turing Machine (TM) rests on two assumptions: (A) There is no mind separate from matter; and (B) The brain works essentially like a digital computer. The aim of my paper is to challenge assumption (A) by providing an alternative view of human mind, as has been conceived in the Abhidhamma . In particular, I should like to argue that: (i) The meaning of lexical items are not recursively determined, as they are conditioned by feelings; and (ii) The number of cittas and cetasikas involved in performing cognitive functions may likely exceed the number of nerve cells in the observable operations of the mind. The evidence to support assumption (A) is provided by the prevalent conception of mind as a TM. It is not my contention to argue whether that view might be regarded, as Godel remarked, “a prejudice of our time”. I shall confine myself only to show that the conception of mind purported in the Abhidhamma may capture som...

Course web page: 
http://www.friederike-moltmann.com/teaching/philosophy-of-language-the-ontology-and-semantics-of-parts-and-wholes-fall-2024/

The course will give an overview of notions of part-whole structure (mereology) that have particularly good applications to natural language, distinguishing extensional mereological theories (Link and related work) and integrity-based approaches (Aristotle, Langacker, Moltmann). It will discuss my own 1997 theory of situated part structure and ist specific motivations, which applies conditions of maximal connectedness to particular situations. It will also discuss the limits of merology for semantic analysis, concerning the notion of a single object and phenomena that have motivated plural reference (reference to several individuals at once) for the semantics of plurals.

Course web page: 
http://www.friederike-moltmann.com/teaching/philosophy-of-language-the-ontology-and-semantics-of-parts-and-wholes-fall-2024/

The course will give an overview of notions of part-whole structure (mereology) that have particularly good applications to natural language, distinguishing extensional mereological theories (Link and related work) and integrity-based approaches (Aristotle, Langacker, Moltmann). It will discuss my own 1997 theory of situated part structure and ist specific motivations, which applies conditions of maximal connectedness to particular situations. It will also discuss the limits of merology for semantic analysis, concerning the notion of a single object and phenomena that have motivated plural reference (reference to several individuals at once) for the semantics of plurals.

The tastes of a user can be represented in a natural way by using qualitative preferences. In this paper, we describe how to combine ontological knowledge with CP-nets to represent preferences in a qualitative way and enriched with domain knowledge. Specifically, we focus on conjunctive query (CQ) answering under CP-net-based preferences. We define k-rank answers to CQs based on the user's preferences encoded in an ontological CP-net and we provide an algorithm for k-rank answering CQs.

Ontological queries are evaluated against an ontology rather than directly on a database. The evaluation and optimization of such queries is an intriguing new problem for database research. In this paper we discuss two important aspects of this problem: query rewriting and query optimization. Query rewriting consists of the compilation of an ontological query into an equivalent query against the underlying relational database. The focus here is on soundness and completeness. We review previous results and present a new rewriting algorithm for rather general types of ontological constraints. In particular, we show how a conjunctive query against an ontology can be compiled into a union of conjunctive queries against the underlying database. Ontological query optimization, in this context, attempts to improve this process so to produce possibly small and cost-effective UCQ rewritings for an input query. We review existing optimization methods, and propose an effective new method that works for linear Datalog ± , a class of Datalog-based rules that encompasses well-known description logics of the DL-Lite family.

The Russian imperfective aspect has diverse meanings including the so-called existential General Factual use and the so-called concrete General Factual (Paducheva 1996) = 'Individual Factual' (Mehlig 2013). I argue that the notion of 'general facts' is fake and both uses of the Russian imperfective aspect indeed refer to sets of events, not to a single event.

Geospatial ontologies have a key role to play in the development of the geospatial-Semantic Web, with regard to facilitating the search for geographical information and resources. They normally hold large volumes of geographic information and undergo a continuous process of revision and update. Limitations of the OWL ontology representation language for supporting geospatial domains are discussed and an integrated rule and ontology language is recognized as needed to support the representation and reasoning requirements in this domain. A survey of the current approaches to integrating ontologies and rules is presented and a new framework is proposed that is based on and extends Description Logic Programs. A hybrid representational approach is adopted where the logical component of the framework is used to represent geographical concepts and spatial rules and an external computational geometry processor is used for storing and manipulating the associated geometric data. A sample application is used to demonstrate the proposed language and engine and how they address the identified challenges.

A geo-ontology has a key role to play in the development of a spatially aware search engine, with regard to providing support for query disambiguation, query term expansion, relevance ranking and web resource annotation. This paper reviews those functions and identifies the challenges arising in the construction and maintenance of such an ontology. Two current contenders for the representation of the geo-ontology are GML, a specific markup language for geographic domains and OWL, a generic ontology representation language. Both languages are used to model the geo-ontology designed for supporting web retrieval of geographic concepts. The powers and limitations of the languages are identified. In particular, the paper highlights the lack of representation and reasoning abilities for different types of rules needed for supporting the geo-ontology.

Web services and Service-Oriented Computing is being widely adopted. In order to effectively reuse existing services, we need an infrastructure that allows users and applications to discover, deploy, compose, and synthesize services automatically. This automation can take place only if a formal description of the Web services is available. In this article we present an infrastructure using USDL (Universal Service-Semantics Description Language), a language for formally describing the semantics of Web services. USDL is based on the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and employs WordNet as a common basis for understanding the meaning of services. USDL can be regarded as formal service documentation that will allow sophisticated conceptual modeling and searching of available Web services, automated service composition, and other forms of automated service integration. A theory of service substitution using USDL is presented. The rationale behind the design of USDL along with its formal specif...