The concept of niche (setting, context, habitat, environment) has been little studied by ontologists, in spite of its wide application in a variety of disciplines from evolutionary biology to economics. What follows is a first formal theory of this concept, a theory of the relations between objects and their niches. The theory builds upon existing work on mereology, topology, and the theory of ...

After the broad industrialization of the US pork industry, there has been a development of niche markets for export and domestic pork; that is, there is a pork niche market phenomenon. The US pork niche market phenomenon is characterized, and 2 of the major markets are explained in detail. With the Midwest's tradition of a diversified family-based agriculture and record low hog prices of the la...

which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Mesenchymal stromal cells (MSCs) are nonhematopoietic adherent cell populations in the bone marrow (BM) that exhibit multilineage differentiation potential towards diverse types of tissues. These MSCs are widely used for cell-therapy applications to stimulat...

We present here some additions to a fuzzy variable radius niche technique called Dynamic Niche Clustering (DNC) [3, 4 & 5] that enable the identification and creation of niches of arbitrary shape through a mechanism called Niche Linkage. We show that by using this mechanism it is possible to attain better feature extraction from the underlying population.