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.

Ontologies have become increasingly important as the use of knowledge graphs, machine learning, natural language processing (NLP), and the amount of data generated on a daily basis has exploded. As of 2014, 90% of the data in the digital universe was generated in the two years prior, and the volume of data was projected to grow from 3.2 zettabytes to 40 zettabytes in the next six years. The very real issues that government, research, and commercial organizations are facing in order to sift through this amount of information to support decision-making alone mandate increasing automation. Yet, the data profiling, NLP, and learning algorithms that are ground-zero for data integration, manipulation, and search provide less than satisfactory results unless they utilize terms with unambiguous semantics, such as those found in ontologies and well-formed rule sets. Ontologies can provide a rich "schema" for the knowledge graphs underlying these technologies as well as the terminological and semantic basis for dramatic improvements in results. Many ontology projects fail, however, due at least in part to a lack of discipline in the development process. This book, motivated by the Ontology 101 tutorial given for many years at what was originally the Semantic Technology Conference (SemTech) and then later from a semester-long university class, is designed to provide the foundations for ontology engineering. The book can serve as a course textbook or a primer for all those interested in ontologies.

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

The World Wide Web contains large amounts of data, and in most cases this data has no explicit structure. The lack of structure makes it difficult for automated agents to understand and use such data. A step towards a more structured World Wide Web is the Semantic Web, which aims at introducing semantics to data on the World Wide Web. One of the key technologies in this endeavour are ontologies, which provide a means for modeling a domain of interest and are used for search and integration of data. In recent years many ontologies have been developed. To be able to use multiple ontologies it is necessary to align them, i.e., find inter-ontology relationships. However, developing and aligning ontologies is not an easy task and it is often the case that ontologies and their alignments are incorrect and incomplete. This can be a problem for semantically-enabled applications. Incorrect and incomplete ontologies and alignments directly influence the quality of the results of such applications, as wrong results can be returned and correct results can be missed. This thesis focuses on the problem of completing ontologies and ontology networks. The contributions of the thesis are threefold. First, we address the issue of completing the is-a structure and alignment in ontologies and ontology networks. We have formalized the problem of completing the is-a structure in ontologies as an abductive reasoning problem and developed algorithms as well as systems for dealing with the problem. With respect to the completion of alignments, we have studied system performance in the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative, a yearly evaluation campaign for ontology alignment systems. We have also addressed the scalability of ontology matching, which is one of the current challenges, by developing an approach for reducing the search space when generating the alignment.Second, high quality completion requires user involvement. As users' time and effort are a limited resource we address the issue of limiting and facilitating user interaction in the completion process. We have conducted a broad study of state-of-the-art ontology alignment systems and identified different issues related to the process. We have also conducted experiments to assess the impact of user errors in the completion process. While the completion of ontologies and ontology networks can be done at any point in the life-cycle of ontologies and ontology networks, some of the issues can be addressed already in the development phase. The third contribution of the thesis addresses this by introducing ontology completion and ontology alignment into an existing ontology development methodology.

"The focus of this book is on information and communication sciences, computer science, and artificial intelligence and provides readers with access to the latest knowledge related to design, modeling and implementation of ontologies"--Provided by publisher.

This book is a collection of articles authored by renowed Polish ontologists living and working in the early part of the 21st century. Harking back to the well-known Polish Lvov-Warsaw School, founded by Kazimierz Twardowski, we try to make our ontological considerations as systematically rigorous and clear as possible – i.e. to the greatest extent feasible, but also no more than the subject under consideration itself allows for. Hence, the papers presented here do not seek to steer clear of methods of inquiry typical of either the formal or the natural sciences: on the contrary, they use such methods wherever possible. At the same time, despite their adherence to rigorous methods, the Polish ontologists included here do not avoid traditional ontological issues, being inspired as they most certainly are by the great masters of Western philosophy – from Plato and Aristotle, through St. Thomas and Leibniz, to Husserl, to name arguably just the most important.

Contemporary analytic philosophy can generally be characterized by the following tendencies: commitment to first-order predicate logic as the only viable formal logic; rejection of correspondence theories of truth; a view of existence as something expressed by the existential quantifier; a metaphysics that doesn’t give the world as a whole its due. This book seeks to offer an alternative analytic theory, one that provides a unified account of what there is, how we speak about it, the underlying logic of our language, how the truth of what we say is determined, and the central role of the real world in all of this. The result is a robust account of reality. The inspiration for many of the ideas that constitute this overall theory comes from such sources as Aristotle, Leibniz, Ryle, and Sommers.

Ontology was once understood to be the philosophical inquiry into the structure of reality: the analysis and categorization of ‘what there is’. Recently, however, a field called ‘ontology’ has become part of the rapidly growing research industry in information technology. The two fields have more in common than just their name. Theory and Applications of Ontology is a two-volume anthology that aims to further an informed discussion about the relationship between ontology in philosophy and ontology in information technology. It fills an important lacuna in cutting-edge research on ontology in both fields, supplying stage-setting overview articles on history and method, presenting directions of current research in either field, and highlighting areas of productive interdisciplinary contact. Theory and Applications of Ontology: Computer Applications presents ontology in ways that philosophers are not likely to find elsewhere. The volume offers an overview of current research in ontology, distinguishing basic conceptual issues, domain applications, general frameworks, and mathematical formalisms. It introduces the reader to current research on frameworks and applications in information technology in ways that are sure to invite reflection and constructive responses from ontologists in philosophy.

Ontology began life in ancient times as a fundamental part of philosophical enquiry concerned with the analysis and categorisation of what exists. In recent years, the subject has taken a practical turn with the advent of complex computerised information systems which are reliant on robust and coherent representations of their subject matter. The systematisation and elaboration of such representations and their associated reasoning techniques constitute the modern discipline of formal ontology, which is now being applied to such diverse domains as artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, bioinformatics, GIS, knowledge engineering, information retrieval and the Semantic Web. Researchers in all these areas are becoming increasingly aware of the need for serious engagement with ontology, understood as a general theory of the types of entities and relations making up their respective domains of enquiry, to provide a solid foundation for their work. The conference series Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS) provides a meeting point for researchers from these and other disciplines with an interest in formal ontology, where both theoretical issues and concrete applications can be explored in a spirit of genuine interdisciplinarity. This volume contains the proceedings of the sixth FOIS conference, held in Toronto, Canada, during 11-14 May 2010, including invited talks by Francis Jeffry Pelletier, John Bateman, and Alan Rector and the 28 peer-reviewed submissions selected for presentation at the conference, ranging from foundational issues to more application-oriented topics. IOS Press is an international science, technical and medical publisher of high-quality books for academics, scientists, and professionals in all fields. Some of the areas we publish in: -Biomedicine -Oncology -Artificial intelligence -Databases and information systems -Maritime engineering -Nanotechnology -Geoengineering -All aspects of physics -E-governance -E-commerce -The knowledge economy -Urban studies -Arms control -Understanding and responding to terrorism -Medical informatics -Computer Sciences

"This book provides an overview of current research and development activities in the area of web semantics and ontology, giving an in-depth description of different issues, including modeling, using ontologies in enterprise systems, querying and knowledge discovering of ontologies"--Provided by publisher.