In a series of publications, we have employed ontological theories and principles used to evaluate and improve the quality of conceptual modeling grammars and models. In this article, we continue this work by providing an ontological interpretation and sound modeling guidelines for a traditionally neglected notion in the conceptual modeling literature, namely, the representation of types whose ...

The paper presents experience in teaching of knowledge and ontological engineering. The teaching framework is targeted on the development of cognitive skills that will allow facilitating the process of knowledge elicitation, structuring and ontology development for scaffolding students’ research. The structuring procedure is the kernel of ontological engineering. The 5-steps ontology designing ...

Information Systems (IS) should be based on consistent representations of the reality. Poor modeling results in problems throughout the IS development. Ontologies are key instruments for the improvement of conceptual modeling since they are able to provide well-defined semantics. This paper discusses the application of foundational ontologies in conceptual modeling, presenting partial results o...

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 of thought, the au...

The purpose of this paper is to explore some semantic problems related to the use of linguistic ontologies in information systems, and to suggest some organizing principles aimed to solve such problems. The taxonomic structure of current ontologies is unfortunately quite complicated and hard to understand, especially for what concerns the upper levels. I will focus here on the problem of ISA ov...

Much work has recently been devoted to the subject of ontological engineering. Although various methodologies have been developed to assist in this difficult task, these have necessarily focussed initial attempts on the overall process. Consequently, there is a need to provide advice to the ontological engineer on the details of developing ontologies. In this paper, we specifically address hier...

The deployment of ubiquitous sensor systems and algorithms has led to many challenges, such as matching sensor systems to compatible algorithms which are capable of satisfying a task. Compounding the challenges is the lack of the requisite knowledge models needed to discover sensors and algorithms and to subsequently integrate their capabilities to satisfy a specific task. A novel ontological p...

This chapter describes work on an integrated system that can assist analysts in exploring hypotheses using Bayesian analysis of evidence from a variety of sources. The hypothesis exploration is aided by an ontology that represents domain knowledge, events, and causality for Bayesian reasoning, as well as models of information sources for evidential reasoning. We are validating the approach via ...

The task of information extraction can be seen as a problem of semantic matching between a user-defined template and a piece of information written in natural language. To this purpose, the ontological assumptions of the template need to be suitably specified, and compared with the ontological implications of the text. So-called “ontologies”, consisting of theories of various kinds expressing t...

As is well known, there are two crucial arguments in the realism debate. According to the no-miracles argument, it would be a miracle if our best scientific theories – namely, those which successfully predict novel phenomena – were not true (or approximately true). So, we should take theories that yield novel predictions as being true or, at least, approximately so. Clearly, considerations of t...