“Mereology? What on Earth is that?” you ask. Well you may ask, since you won‟t find the word in the American Heritage dictionary, nor even in the 8-volume Encyclopedia of Philosophy. However, if you look in the more enlightened Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, you‟ll discover that mereology is “the mathematical theory of parts and wholes.” A very useful word, wouldn‟t you say? How have we ma...

In many different ontological debates, anti-arbitrariness considerations push one towards two opposing extremes. For example, in debates about mereology, may be pushed a maximal ontolog...

The formalization of the “part – of” relationship goes back to the mereology of S. Leśniewski, subsequently taken up by Leonard & Goodman (1940), and Clarke (1981). In this paper we investigate relation algebras obtained from different notions of “part–of”, respectively, “connectedness” in various domains. We obtain minimal models for the relational part of mereology in a general setting, and w...

In one perspective, the central problem pursued in this research is that of the inverse problem in the context of general rough sets. The problem is about the existence of rough basis for given approximations in a context. Granular operator spaces were recently introduced by the present author as an optimal framework for anti-chain based algebraic semantics of general rough sets and the inverse...

In spatial reasoning the qualitative description of relations between spatial regions is of practical importance and has been widely studied. Examples of such relations are that two regions may meet only at their boundaries or that one region is a proper part of another. This paper shows how systems of relations between regions can be extended from precisely known regions to approximate ones. O...

Published to mark James Flege’s retirement, this collection of papers is a fitting tribute to one of the most influential and probably the most prolific scientists in the field of second language (L2) speech research. In 365 pages 20 papers offer discussion and present empirical findings on a wide variety of topics from the field of secondor foreign-language research, and a further 40 pages of ...

In contemporary parlance, qualitative reasoning can be regarded as reasoning about physical systems by exploring their structural properties. Qualitative spatial reasoning, in particular, aims to express non– numerical relationships among spatial objects based on relations such as “in contact with” and “part of”. Its roots include the region-based theories of space of de Laguna [1] and Whitehea...

A notion of a synthesis granule is proposed based on rough mereological theory of multi-agent systems developed by the authors. The metafor "granule of knowledge" has appeared recently 6], 7] in the research literature devoted to the problems of approximate reasoning and soft computing and the importance of granulation of knowledge for these problems has been stressed therein. The meaning of th...

Representing and reasoning about knowledge is critical in Artificial Intelligence. There is a distinction between factual and ontological knowledge. Factual knowledge represents a set of facts about individual objects that are known or believed whereas ontological (background) knowledge represents implicit concepts and relationships that are assumed to exist in the world. Ontological knowledge ...