For humans, understanding a natural language sentence or discourse is so effortless that we hardly ever think about it. For machines, however, the task of interpreting natural language, especially grasping meaning beyond the literal content, has proven extremely difficult and requires a large amount of background knowledge. This book focuses on the interpretation of natural language with respect to specific domain knowledge captured in ontologies. The main contribution is an approach that puts ontologies at the center of the interpretation process. This means that ontologies not only provide a formalization of domain knowledge necessary for interpretation but also support and guide the construction of meaning representations. We start with an introduction to ontologies and demonstrate how linguistic information can be attached to them by means of the ontology lexicon model lemon. These lexica then serve as basis for the automatic generation of grammars, which we use to compositionally construct meaning representations that conform with the vocabulary of an underlying ontology. As a result, the level of representational granularity is not driven by language but by the semantic distinctions made in the underlying ontology and thus by distinctions that are relevant in the context of a particular domain. We highlight some of the challenges involved in the construction of ontology-based meaning representations, and show how ontologies can be exploited for ambiguity resolution and the interpretation of temporal expressions. Finally, we present a question answering system that combines all tools and techniques introduced throughout the book in a real-world application, and sketch how the presented approach can scale to larger, multi-domain scenarios in the context of the Semantic Web. Table of Contents: List of Figures / Preface / Acknowledgments / Introduction / Ontologies / Linguistic Formalisms / Ontology Lexica / Grammar Generation / Putting Everything Together / Ontological Reasoning for Ambiguity Resolution / Temporal Interpretation / Ontology-Based Interpretation for Question Answering / Conclusion / Bibliography / Authors' Biographies

All except three of the papers in this volume were presented at the colloquium on "L'Ontologie formelle aujourd'hui", Geneva, 3-5 June 1988. The three exceptions, the papers by David Armstrong, Uwe Meixner and Wolfgang Lenzen, were presented at the colloquium on "Properties", Zinal, June 1-3, 1990. It was, incidentally, at the second of these two colloquia that the European Society for Analytic Philosophy came into being. The fathers of analytic philosophy - Moore and Russell - were in no doubt that ontology or metaphysics as well as the topics oflanguage, truth and logic constituted the core subject-matter of their "analytic realism", 1 for the task of metaphysics as they conceived things was the description of 2 the world. And logic and ontology are indissolubly linked in the system of the grandfather of analytic philosophy, Frege. After the Golden Age of analytic philosophy - in Cambridge and Austria - opposition to realism as well as the "linguistic turn" contributed for a long time to the eclipse of ontology. 3 Thanks in large measure to the work of some of the senior contributors to the present volume - Roderick Chisholm, Herbert Hochberg, David Armstrong and Karel Lambert - ontology and metaphysics now enjoy once again the central position they occupied some eighty years ago in the heyday of analytic philosophy.

Just as ontology developed over the centuries as part of philosophy, so in recent years ontology has become intertwined with the development of the information sciences. Researchers in such areas 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 has started to focus on the content of information rather than on just the formats and languages in terms of which information is represented. A clear 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 science raises specific ontological questions which call for further philosophical investigations.

The complex information systems which have evolved in recent decades rely on robust and coherent representations in order to function. Such representations and associated reasoning techniques constitute the modern discipline of formal ontology, which is now applied to fields such as artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, bioinformatics, GIS, conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering, information retrieval, and the semantic web. Ontologies are increasingly employed in a number of complex real-world application domains. For instance, in biology and medicine, more and more principle-based ontologies are being developed for the description of biological and biomedical phenomena. To be effective, such ontologies must work well together, and as they become more widely used, achieving coordinated development presents a significant challenge. This book presents collected articles from the 7th International Conference on Formal Ontologies (FOIS), held in Graz, Austria, in July 2012.FOIS is a forum which brings together representatives of all major communities involved in the development and application of ontologies to explore both theoretical issues and concrete applications in the field. The book is organized in eight sections, each of which deals with the ontological aspects of: bioinformatics; physical entities; artifacts and human resources; ontology evaluation; language and social relations; time and events; representation and the methodological aspects of ontological engineering. Providing a current overview of developments in formal ontology, this book will be of interest to all those whose work involves the application of ontologies, and to anybody wishing to keep abreast of advances in the field.

L. Nathan Oaklander is one of the leading philosophers of time defending the tenseless or B-Theory of time. He has remained at the forefront of this field since the early 1980s and today he is arguably the most formidable opponent of the tensed or A-theory of time. Much of the direction of the debate in this field for the past twenty years or so, especially in regards to the new tenseless theory of time, has been influenced by Oaklander's work. This book presents a carefully argued defense of the tenseless theory of time. The topics discussed include: the ontology of A- and B-theories of time; presentism; the open future theory; the A/B theory; defending the B-theory of time; temporal experience; temporal semantics; and time, identity, responsibility, and freedom.

How should we think about the meaning of the words that make up our language? How does reference of these terms work, and what is their referent when these are connected to abstract objects rather than to concrete ones? Can logic help to address these questions? This collection of papers aims to unify the questions of syntax and semantics of language, which span across the fields of logic, philosophy and ontology of language. The leading motif of the presented selection is the differentiation between linguistic tokens (material, concrete objects) on the one hand and linguistic types (ideal, abstract objects) on the other. Through a promenade among articles that span over all of the Author’s career, this book addresses the complex philosophical question of the ontology of language by following the crystalline conceptual tools offered by logic. At the core of Wybraniec-Skardowska’s scholarship is the idea that language is an ontological being, characterized in compliance with the logical conception of language proposed by Ajdukiewicz. The application throughout the book of tools of classical logic and set theory results fosters the emergence of a general formal logical theory of syntax, semantics and of the pragmatics of language, which takes into account the duality token-type in the understanding of linguistic expressions. Via a functional approach to language itself, logic appears as ontologically neutral with respect to existential assumptions relating to the nature of linguistic expressions and their extra-linguistic counterparts. The book is addressed to readers both at the graduate and undergraduate level, but also to a more general audience interested in getting a firmer grip on the interplay between reality and the language we use to describe and understand it.

Heidegger, Ethics and the Practice of Ontology presents an important new examination of ethics and ontology in Heidegger. There remains a basic conviction throughout Heidegger's thought that the event by which Being is given or disclosed is somehow 'prior' to our relation to the many beings we meet in our everyday lives. This priority makes it possible to talk about Being 'as such'. It also sanctions the relegation of ethics to a secondary position with respect to ontology. However, Heidegger's acknowledgement that ontology itself must remain intimately bound to concrete existence problematises the priority accorded to the ontological dimension. David Webb takes this bond as a key point of reference and goes on to develop critical perspectives that open up from within Heidegger's own thought, particularly in relation to Heidegger's debt to Aristotelian physics and ethics. Webb examines the theme of continuity and its role in the constitution of the 'as such' in Heidegger's ontology and argues that to address ontology is to engage in an ethical practice and vice versa.

FOIS is the flagship conference of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications, a non-profit organization which promotes interdisciplinary research and international collaboration at the intersection of philosophical ontology, linguistics, logic, cognitive science, and computer science, as well as in the applications of ontological analysis to conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering, knowledge management, information-systems development, library and information science, scientific research, and semantic technologies in general. This volume presents the 17 papers accepted for the 11th Formal Ontology in Information Systems conference (FOIS 2020). These papers cover a broad range of topics and are organized into 5 groups. Foundations is dedicated to the general ontological decisions providing a foundation for any ontology, both from a philosophical perspective and with an emphasis on applications. Social Entities is dedicated to the ontological analysis and formalization of various social entities, including secrets, legal theories, decisions, kinship, and cultural heritage. The papers in Intentionality and Embodiment analyze aspects of an agent's intentions, beliefs and desires, as well as the embodiment of functional relations. The section on Parts and Wholes is dedicated to mereology as well as the mereological analysis of certain types of entities (e.g., pluralities, information entities, and computer programs). Lastly, the papers in Methods are about ontology evaluation and use. Altogether, the papers reflect traditional FOIS themes with perhaps a greater emphasis on social and agent aspects, and will be of interest to all those whose work involves ontology and its applications.

Based on author's thesis from the Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems.