The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a defacto notation for model driven software development (MDSD), emphasizing on model to model refinements and transformations. However UML may not be expressive enough to describe all aspects as required by recent MDSD models. A noticeable weakness is its inability to express the ontological concepts often encountered in MDSD. In this paper, we propose an...

The intuitive simplicity of the so-called is-a (or subsumption) relationship has led to widespread ontological misuse. Where previous work has focused largely on the semantics of the relationship itself, we concentrate here on the ontological nature of its arguments, in order to tell whether a single is-a link is ontologically well-founded. For this purpose, we introduce some techniques based o...

A number of authors [BBH96][vHA96] have proposed that PSMs be described not only in a domain-independent, but also task-independent way, so that they can become more broadly reusable. However, there is a trade-off between usability and reusability [KBD+91], which means that there is a need for techniques which facilitate the process of configuring a task-independent PSM for a particular task an...

Throughout his illustrious career, Roderick Chisholm was concerned with the nature of persons. On his view, persons are what he called ‘entia per se.’ They exist per se, in their own right. I too have developed an account of persons—I call it the ‘Constitution View’—an account that is different in important ways from Chisholm’s. Here, however, I want to focus on a thesis that Chisholm and I agr...

The need for an ontological layer on top of data, associated with advanced reasoning mechanisms able to exploit the semantics encoded in ontologies, has been acknowledged both in the database and knowledge representation communities. We focus in this paper on the ontological query answering problem, which consists of querying data while taking ontological knowledge into account. To tackle this ...

Ontological queries are evaluated against a database combined with ontological constraints. Answering such queries is a challenging new problem for database research. For many ontological modelling languages, query answering can be solved via query rewriting: given a conjunctive query and an ontology, the query can be transformed into a first-order query, called the perfect rewriting, that take...

The paradigm of referent tracking is based on a realist presupposition which rejects so-called negative entities (congenital absent nipple, and the like) as spurious. How, then, can a referent tracking-based Electronic Health Record deal with what are standardly called 'negative findings'? To answer this question we carried out an analysis of some 748 sentences drawn from patient charts and con...

Theory testing within small-N research designs is problematic. Developments in the philosophy of social science have opened up new methodological possibilities through, among other things, a novel notion of contingent causality that allows for contextualized hypothesis generation, hypothesis testing and refinement, and generalization. This article contributes to the literature by providing an e...

Theory testing within small-N research designs is problematic. Developments in the philosophy of social science have opened up new methodological possibilities through, among other things, a novel notion of contingent causality that allows for contextualized hypothesis generation, hypothesis testing and refinement, and generalization. This article contributes to the literature by providing an e...

This paper will compare two of the most prominent mystics of Islam and Hinduism on what may be called the “end of the mystical journey,” or mokśa in Hindu spirituality and fanā in Islamic mysticism. The interpretations of these two mystics are naturally developed according to their own epistemological and ontological bases. Thus, referring to their most significant principles ...