Formal Ontology in Information Systems: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference FOIS 2006

B. Bennett and C. Fellbaum, Editors9781586036850, 1-58603-685-8

Researchers in areas such as artificial intelligence, formal and computational linguistics, biomedical informatics, conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering and information retrieval have come to realize that a solid foundation for their research calls for serious work in ontology, understood as a general theory of the types of entities and relations that make up their respective domains of inquiry. In all these areas, attention is now being focused on the content of information rather than on just the formats and languages used to represent information. The clearest example of this development is provided by the many initiatives growing up around the project of the Semantic Web. And, as the need for integrating research in these different fields arises, so does the realization that strong principles for building well-founded ontologies might provide significant advantages over ad hoc, case-based solutions. The tools of formal ontology address precisely these needs, but a real effort is required in order to apply such philosophical tools to the domain of information systems. Reciprocally, research in the information sciences raises specific ontological questions which call for further philosophical investigations. The purpose of FOIS is to provide a forum for genuine interdisciplinary exchange in the spirit of a unified effort towards solving the problems of ontology, with an eye to both theoretical issues and concrete applications. This book contains a wide range of areas, all of which are important to the development of formal ontologies.

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Table of contents :
Title page……Page 2
Preface……Page 6
Conference Organisation……Page 8
Contents……Page 12
Invited Talks……Page 16
Problems of Scale in Building, Maintaining and Using Very Large Formal Ontologies……Page 18
On What Goes On: The Ontology of Processes and Events……Page 19
Foundations and Methodology……Page 28
Against Idiosyncrasy in Ontology Development……Page 30
Distinctions Produce a Taxonomic Lattice: Are These the Units of Mentalese?……Page 42
Nontological Engineering……Page 54
Towards Foundational Semantics: Ontological Semantics Revisited……Page 66
Space and Mereology……Page 78
A Theory of Granular Parthood Based on Qualitative Cardinality and Size Measures……Page 80
Spatial Dimensionality as a Classification Criterion for Qualities……Page 92
The Image as Spatial Region: Location and Adjacency Within the Radiological Image……Page 104
Ontology in Biology and Biochemistry……Page 116
From GENIA to BIOTOP: Towards a Top-Level Ontology for Biology……Page 118
Modular Ontology Design Using Canonical Building Blocks in the Biochemistry Domain……Page 130
What Is a Biological Function?……Page 143
Actions and Events……Page 156
Simultaneous Events and the “Once-Only” Effect……Page 158
Temporal Qualification and Change with First-Order Binary Predicates……Page 170
The Instrumental Stit: A Study of Action and Instrument……Page 182
Towards an Ontology of Agency and Action: From STIT to OntoSTIT+……Page 194
General Ontological Issues……Page 206
A Blueprint for a Calculator of Intensions……Page 208
A Dynamic Theory of Ontology……Page 219
Behavior of a Technical Artifact: An Ontological Perspective in Engineering……Page 229
A Reusable Ontology for Fluents in OWL……Page 241
PR-OWL: A Framework for Probabilistic Ontologies……Page 252
Qualities in Possible Worlds……Page 265
Linking and Merging Ontologies……Page 278
An Algebra for Composing Ontologies……Page 280
Formalizing Ontology Alignment and its Operations with Category Theory……Page 292
Linking FrameNet to the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology……Page 304
Linking the Gene Ontology with Social Ontology: A Prolegomena to the Ontology of Personhood……Page 316
Principles for the Development of Upper Ontologies in Higher-Level Information Fusion Applications……Page 324
Towards a Realism-Based Metric for Quality Assurance in Ontology Matching……Page 336
Maintaining and Exploiting Ontologies……Page 348
Approximation of Ontologies in CASL……Page 350
OntOWLClean: Cleaning OWL Ontologies with OWL……Page 362
Using Selectional Restrictions to Query an OWL Ontology……Page 375
Author Index……Page 388