Conceptual Models as Tools for Communication Across Disciplines

Can epidemic models describe the diffusion of topics across disciplines?

This paper introduces a new approach to describe the spread of research topics across disciplines using epidemic models. The approach is based on applying individual-based models from mathematical epidemiology to the diffusion of a research topic over a contact network that represents knowledge flows over the map of science –as obtained from citations between ISI Subject Categories. Using resea...

Olfactory consciousness across disciplines

Although vision is the de facto model system of consciousness research, studying olfactory consciousness has its own advantages, as this collection of articles emphatically demonstrates. One advantage of olfaction is its computational and phenomenological simplicity, which facilitates the identification of basic principles. Other researchers study olfactory consciousness not because of its simp...

Contents Ontologies across disciplines

Theoretical foundations and engineering tools for building ontologies as reference conceptual models

Perhaps the most fundamental notion underlying the desiderata for a successful Semantic Web is Semantic Interoperability. In this context, ontologies have been more and more recognized as one of the enabling technologies. This paper defends the view that an approach which neglects the role of ontologies as reference conceptual models cannot meet the requirements for full semantic interoperabili...

Ontologies as Conceptual Models for XML Documents

Access to XML-based documents currently relies on query languages that are closely tied to the document structures, i.e. when looking for information one has to be aware of this structure and cannot easily specify the information needs conceptually. Our approach uses ontologies to access sets of distributed XML documents on a conceptual level. We integrate conceptual modeling, inheritance, and ...