The main goal of this paper is to present a systematic methodology for selecting general ontological categories to be used for multiple practical purposes. After a brief overview of our basic assumptions concerning the way a useful top-level ontology should be linked to language and cognition, we present a set of primitive relations that we believe play a foundational role. On the basis of thes...

In recent work we have extended DACMAS, which is a formalization of ontology-based and commitment-based multi-agent systems. Our extension allows a system to include not only agents but also external contexts. The objective is that of modeling real-world situations where agents not only interact among themselves, but also consult external heterogeneous dataand knowledge-bases to extract useful ...

Behavior analysis is intimately linked to radical behaviorism, the philosophy of the science of behavior. Ontological discussions in the latter are easily generalized to the former, in which case behavior analysis is not judged by its scientific merit, but evaluated on the basis of philosophical matters. According to pragmatism, the meaning of discourse is to be understood in terms of its effec...

The notion of 'information' is one of the most basic in the Information Systems field. However, a clear consensus of what the term signifies remains evasive to both theorists and practitioners. Even in the applied discipline of Information Systems Development, the notion of information as representation is ambiguous. To motivate the discussion, we demonstrate a variety of contradictory stances ...

I revisit here the motivations and the main proposal of paper I published at the 1994 Wittgenstein Symposium, entitled “The Ontological Level”, in the light of the main results achieved in the latest 30 years of Knowledge Representation, since the well known “What’s in a link?” paper by Bill Woods. I will argue that, despite the explosion of ontologies, many problems are still there, since ther...

We have developed an environment for building/using ontologies, named Hozo, based on both of a fundamental consideration of an ontological theory and a methodology of building an ontology. Since Hozo is based on an ontological theory of a role-concept, it can distinguish concepts dependent on particular contexts from so-called basic concepts and contribute to building reusable ontologies.

Recent developments in the standardization of learning technology have resulted in models of learning activities and resources including descriptive metadata and definitions of conditional flows for multi-role activities. Nonetheless, such learning designs are actually representations of the results of the design process and do not provide information about the rationale of the design, i.e. abo...

This article synthesizes scholarship on narratives and Kleinian defense mechanisms against anxiety to develop a framework that enables nuanced understanding of ontological security-seeking dynamics in times crisis. Using the case study German narrative European Union during so-called migration crisis 2015, this engages with broader question how unconscious phantasy influences guides decision-ma...

Aristotle holds that individual substances are ontologically independent from nonsubstances and universal substances but that non-substances and universal substances are ontologically dependent on substances. ! ere is then an asymmetry between individual substances and other kinds of beings with respect to ontological dependence. Under what could plausibly be called the standard interpretation,...