Ontology (Computer Science)

A suite of standards known as the Semantic Web is transforming the Internet to a semantic graph rather than a graph of hypertext links. This paper will describe how various ideas and initiatives in artificial intelligence knowledge representation influenced its design. We begin with the seminal work by Alan Turing and Alonzo Church that led to the definition of Turing Machines, enabled digital computing, and provided the mathematical theory of computation which has been one of the determining factors for Artificial Intelligence knowledge representation. We then provide a brief history of artificial intelligence knowledge representation starting with groundbreaking researchers such as Newell and Simon, then to the first "AI boom" driven primarily by rule-based expert systems followed by major initiatives such as Cyc and the DARPA Knowledge Sharing Initiative. We will discuss how innovations from these initiatives affected standards that in turn led to the suite of standards known as the Semantic Web. We conclude with a brief overview of the most important issues currently facing those who wish to see widespread adoption of Semantic Web technology in industry.

Business is increasingly employing sustainability practices, aiming to improve environmental and social responsibility while maintaining and improving profitability. For many organizations, profit-oriented business models are a major constraint impeding progress in sustainability. A formally defined ontology, a model definition, for profit-oriented business models has been employed globally for several years. However, no equivalent ontology is available in research or practice that enables the description of strongly sustainable business models, as validated by ecological economics and derived from natural, social, and system sciences. We present a framework of strongly sustainable business model propositions and principles as findings from a transdisciplinary review of the literature. A comparative analysis was performed between the framework and the Osterwalder profit-oriented ontology for business models. We introduce an ontology that enables the description of successful strongly sustainable business models that resolves weaknesses and includes functionally necessary relationships.

[Since this research was completed, the practitioner visual design tool (the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Canvas) that is conceptually "powered by" the the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Ontology, has been further refined to become the Flourishing Business Canvas - see www.FlourishingBusiness.org for the most recent practice and developments].

This paper is part of the special issue “Business Models for Sustainability: Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Transformation” https://blog.ssbmg.com/2013/07/29/call-for-papers-for-a-special-issue-of-organization-environment-business-models-for-sustainability-entrepreneurship-innovation-and-transformation/.  It was submitted at the personal invitation of guest editors Prof. Dr. Stefan Schaltegger, Prof. Dr. Erik Hansen and Dr. Florian Lüdeke-Freund (Leuphana University Centre for Sustainability Management)

OntoUML and OWL are ontology languages appropriated to different knowledge representation levels. In order to have better knowledge representation and reasoning capabilities in OWL ontologies, an Ontology Engineering should be used – which corresponds to the transformation of a conceptual model ontology language, such as OntoUML, to a computational ontology language, such as OWL. This paper aims to bridge the expressivity gap between these languages through a Model Driven Architecture automated transformation from OntoUML to OWL with SWRL rules that contributes to (i) make easier the OWL creation from OntoUML, (ii) eliminate the human errors in this process, (iii) improve the resultant OWL ontology semantics.

The proposal by the Committee on Legal Affairs (CLA) of the European Parliament to create a specific legal status for robots, aimed at granting the status of ‘electronic persons’ to the most sophisticated autonomous ones, has triggered a discussion on whether machines can achieve self-consciousness and free will. In particular, several Catholic thinkers have expressed perplexity about this hypothesis. Their criticism is often based on the postulates of Thomistic philosophical anthropology. In this article, after showing the magnitude of the debate by means of scientometric tools, we argue that it is premature to grant personhood rights to intelligent machines, but we also underline that, given the rapid development of arti cial intelligence, we should consider the plausibility of this scenario in the future. This is the case because contemporary sciences – in particular biology and computer science – pose a serious challenge to Thomistic anthropology and its modern derivations. We are also persuaded that the Catholic tradition is rich enough to make room for less rigid ideas about personhood and human nature. It seems advantageous to take into account the evolutionary perspective elaborated by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in particular, his idea of the ‘Noosphere’, that is, of a thinking planet that emerges thanks to the symbiotic evolution of humanity and machines, opening the door to the recognition of non-human persons and entrusting the mission of co-creators to human beings.

Service contracts bind parties legally, regulating their behavior in the scope of a (business) service relationship. Given that there are legal consequences attached to service contracts, understanding the elements of a contract is key to managing services in an enterprise. After all, provisions in a service contract and in legislation establish obligations and rights for service providers and customers that must be respected in service delivery. The importance of service contracts to service provisioning in an enterprise has motivated us to investigate their representation in enterprise models. We have observed that approaches fall into two extremes of a spectrum. Some approaches, such as ArchiMate, offer an opaque "contract" construct, not revealing the rights and obligations in the scope of the governed service relationship. Other approaches, under the umbrella term "contract languages", are devoted exactly to the formal representation of the contents of contracts. Despite the applications of contract languages, they operate at a level of detail that does not match that of enterprise architecture models. In this paper, we explore and bridge the gap between these two extremes. We address the representation of service contract elements with a systematic approach: we first propose a well-founded service contract ontology, and then extend the ArchiMate language to reflect the elements of the service contract ontology. The applicability of the proposed extension is assessed in the representation of a real-world cloud service contract.

In this paper, we introduce an algorithm for grouping Arabic documents for building an ontology and its words. We execute the algorithm on five ontologies using Java. We manage the documents by getting 338667 words with its weights corresponding to each ontology. The algorithm had proved its efficiency in optimizing classifiers (SVM, NB) performance, which we tested in this study, comparing with former classifiers results for Arabic language.

دراسة حول تصنيف النصوص العربية باستخدام الأنطولوجيات
نقدم في هذا البحث خوارزمية لتجميع نصوص اللغة العربية. حيث نفذنا الخوارزمية على 5 أنطولوجيات عبر برنامج بلغة الجافا، ثم عالجنا النصوص بحيث حصلنا على 338667 مفردة مع أوزانها المقابلة لكل أنطولوجيا. وقد أثبتت الخوارزمية فعاليتها في تحسين أداء المصنفات التي تم تجربتها في هذه الدراسة مقارنة مع نتائج مصنفات اللغة العربية السابقة

The importance of capabilities and resources for portfolio management and business strategy has been recog- nized in the management literature and on a recent proposal to extend ArchiMate, which includes these concepts in order to improve ArchiMate’s coverage of portfolio management. This paper presents an ontological analysis of the concepts intro- duced in that proposal, focusing in particular on the resource, capability and competence concepts. As a result, it proposes well-founded recommendations for improvements, enhancing its suitability and integration possibilities.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the application of foundational ontologies, i.e., formal ontological theories in the philosophical sense, to provide a theoretically sound foundation for improving the theory and practice of conceptual modeling. In this paper, we present advances on our re- search on the ontological foundations of conceptual modeling by addressing the concept of events. We present a foundational ontology of events (termed UFO- B) together with its axiomatization in first-order logic. Moreover, we report on an implementation of UFO-B using the computational logic language Alloy, and discuss its consistency, validation and possible uses.

In the era of “big data,” science is increasingly information driven, and the potential for computers to store, manage, and integrate massive amounts of data has given rise to such new disciplinary fields as biomedical informatics. Applied ontology offers a strategy for the organization of scientific information in computer-tractable form, drawing on concepts not only from computer and information science but also from linguistics, logic, and philosophy. This book provides an introduction to the field of applied ontology that is of particular relevance to biomedicine, covering theoretical components of ontologies, best practices for ontology design, and examples of biomedical ontologies in use.

After defining an ontology as a representation of the types of entities in a given domain, the book distinguishes between different kinds of ontologies and tax-onomies, and shows how applied ontology draws on more traditional ideas from metaphysics. It presents the core features of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), now used by over one hundred ontology projects around the world, and offers examples of domain ontologies that utilize BFO. The book also describes Web Ontology Language (OWL), a common framework for Semantic Web technolo-gies. Throughout, the book provides concrete recommendations for the design and construction of domain ontologies.

Back cover text: Real Social Science presents a new, hands-on approach to social inquiry. The theoretical and methodological ideas behind the book, inspired by Aristotelian phronesis, represent an original perspective within the social sciences, and this volume gives readers for the first time a set of studies exemplifying what applied phronesis looks like in practice. The reflexive analysis of values and power gives new meaning to the impact of research on policy and practice. Real Social Science is a major step forward in a novel and thriving field of research. This book will benefit scholars, researchers, and students who want to make a difference in practice, not just in the academy. Its message will make it essential reading for students and academics across the social sciences.

—In competitive markets, companies need well-designed business strategies if they seek to grow and obtain sustainable competitive advantage. At the core of a successful business strategy there is a carefully crafted value proposition, which ultimately defines what a company delivers to its customers. Despite their widely recognized importance, there is however little agreement on what exactly value propositions are. This lack of conceptual clarity harms the communication among stakeholders and the harmonization of current business strategy theories and strategy support frameworks. Furthermore , it hinders the development of systematic methodologies for crafting value propositions, as well as adequate support for representing and analyzing them. In this paper, we present an ontological analysis of value propositions based on a review of most relevant business and marketing theories and on previous work on value ascription, grounded in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). Our investigation clarifies how value propositions are different from value presentations, and shows the difference between value propositions at the business level from those related to specific offerings.