Applied Ontology

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.

Events are a recurring topic in ontological modeling and the diversity of their encoding in the semantic web ontological language OWL is immense. We provide a lightweight comparative survey of approaches to event modeling in both foundational and semantic web ontologies, and build upon it a tentative system of four categories of what is commonly called 'event'. A substantial part of the categorization has to do with the distinction between an object and an relationship, as conceived in the lightweight ontological background modeling language PURO.

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.

The aim of the following report is to outline the content of the lectures given during the First IAOA Interdisciplinary Summer School on Ontological Analysis (July 16-20 2012, Trento, Italy). The report emphasizes some of the hot topics or open questions discussed during the sessions, while reflecting a variety of perspectives on the goals of ontological analysis and the importance of interdisciplinarity in dealing with certain problems. Full-paper request: http://iospress.metapress.com/content/h1r5x34112310013/?p=672652b056a64326b179885956e7e33e&pi=3

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.

—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.

Building proper reference ontologies is a hard task. There are a number of methods and tools that traditionally have been used to support this task. These include the use of foundational theories, the reuse of domain and core ontologies, the adoption of development methods, as well as the support of proper software tools. In this context, an approach that has gained increasing attention in recent years is the systematic application of ontology patterns. However, a pattern-based approach to ontology engineering requires: the existence of a set of suitable patterns that can be reused in the construction of new ontologies; a proper methodological support for eliciting these patterns, as well as for applying them in the construction of these new models. The goal of this paper is twofold: (i) firstly, we present an approach for deriving conceptual ontology patterns from ontologies. These patterns are derived from ontologies of different generality levels, ranging from foundational to domain ontologies; (ii) secondly, we present guidelines that describe how these patterns can be applied in combination for building reference domain ontologies in a reuse-oriented process. In summary, this paper is about the construction of ontology patterns from on-tologies, as well as the construction of ontologies from ontology patterns.

One reason oil and gas companies adopt a standard cost coding system is to facilitate benchmarking. NORSOK Z-014 Standard Cost Coding System (SCCS) is an example of this kind of system. This paper describes a set of issues found in a project that attempted to adopt this standard. These were issues whose analysis revealed problems with the standard’s fundamental structure. Further analysis showed that these types of problems are well understood outside the project controls community and resolvable using a classification technique technically known as ‘facets’. The paper provides examples of these issues and indicates how they can be resolved. It also describes the systematic modernization approach adopted by the project to resolve the issues throughout the standard. The aim of this paper is to introduce to the project controls community an understanding of the importance of these issues for raising the quality of their data and the new techniques to provide improved foundations for standard cost coding systems for the oil and gas industry in the 21stCentury.

We introduce a statistical model for analysing the morphology of natural languages based on their affixes. The model was inspired by the analysis of Amis, an Austronesian language with a rich morphology. As words contain a root and potential affixes, we associate three vectors with each word: one for the root, one for the prefixes, and one for the suffixes. The morphology captures semantic notions and we show how to approximately predict some of them, for example the type of simple sentences using prefixes and suffixes only. We then define a Sentence vector s associated with each sentence, built from the prefixes and suffixes of the sentence and show how to approximately predict a derivation tree in a grammar. * This research is financed by the "Typology and dynamics of linguistic systems" strand of the Labex EFL (Empirical Foundations of Linguistics)

The disappointed reader may finally pose the bold question whether there is a real meaning of Kant. The answer to this question, it seems to me, is both yes and no. If we mean by a real meaning, a unified understanding of Kant apparent to anyone who takes the time and effort to make a careful study of the Critique of Pure Reason, then there is no real meaning. But if a real meaning is an understanding of Kant's transcendental philosophy based on one or a few unifying themes or doctrines posited as central, then there is a real meaning of Kant, or more precisely, there are several meanings of Kant to several philosophers. Various thinkers who have studied Kant's transcendental ontology or philosophy have sought to unify what he accomplished by reference to one or a few key notions operative in the Critique of Pure Reason, but none of these readings of Kant has won general acceptance. Kant's transcendental philosophy made both positive and negative impacts in the minds and lives of readers. The negative influence was so pronounced in lives and works of Dooyeweerd, Moses Mendelssohn and Heinrich von Kleist to mention but a few. For Dooyeweerd, Kant's sharp separation of the practical from the theoretical, the noumenal from the phenomenal, shatters the coherence of reality and break the cosmos asunder into two spheres. To Moses Mendelssohn, Kant is the all-destroyer. Heinrich von Kleist moaned how Kant shattered his life; 'we cannot determine whether that which we call truth really is truth or only appears to be truth, my life-plan had collapsed, my only and highest goal has sunk, and I no longer have a goal.' He turned from the Enlightenment emphasis on rationality to a preoccupation with feeling and the non-rational side of consciousness. But he never found full satisfaction, and in 1811 he finally took his own life. This paper is of the view that Kant's human transcendence had no critics but critiques because the lacuna they claim to discover inspired a new line of philosophy. Most philosophers, who take a positive or approving attitude toward Kant's notion of human transcendence, tend to regard him as a forerunner of their own philosophical positions.