This book is about the nature of information. It touches on many core issues of philosophy of the mind, ontology, and epistemology, and draws in several domain-specific concepts from physics, mathematics, thermodynamics, computer science, and biology. The terms used in this book, such as the mind, a conscious agent, meaning, and knowledge are used with very precise meanings because they can be easily misinterpreted. A proper understanding of these terms can be gained from the referenced literature. But more specifically, this book is about the concept of information as physical phenomenon.The book is a unique exposition of the concept of information as physical phenomenon. It provides the detailed analysis and synthesis of the current conceptualizations of information demonstrating the lack of common definition and their incompleteness. The detailed argument is provided why information may be defined as a physical phenomenon and why this type of information may be seen as fundamental to our understanding of this concept.

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.

"This book provides cutting-edge research on reality, its nature and fundamental structure, represented both by human minds and intelligent machines.--striving to describe a world model and ontology; organized human knowledge; powerful reasoning systems; and secure communication interoperability between human beings and computing reasoning systems promising the profound revolution in human values and ways of life"--Provided by publisher.

A universal approach to the ontology of geographic space has already been, and is going to be, a comprehensive task for establishing more effective spatial models. The concept of a universal spatial ontology should be independent of location, culture, and time. It should be fundamental and universal in the same way that the number p defines the ratio between the diameter and the circumference of a circle. The term “universal” therefore means all-embracing and for general propose. Universal Ontology of Geographic Space: Semantic Enrichment for Spatial Data aims to escalate the current scope of research to support the development of semantically interoperable systems of geographic space. This reference will aid university lecturers and professors, students, researchers, developers of spatial applications.

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.

A comprehensive theory-based approach to the treatment of text meaning in natural language processing applications.

This book seeks to work out which commitments are minimally sufficient to obtain an ontology of the natural world that matches all of today’s well-established physical theories. We propose an ontology of the natural world that is defined only by two axioms: (1) There are distance relations that individuate simple objects, namely matter points. (2) The matter points are permanent, with the distances between them changing. Everything else comes in as a means to represent the change in the distance relations in a manner that is both as simple and as informative as possible. The book works this minimalist ontology out in philosophical as well as mathematical terms and shows how one can understand classical mechanics, quantum field theory and relativistic physics on the basis of this ontology. Along the way, we seek to achieve four subsidiary aims: (a) to make a case for a holistic individuation of the basic objects (ontic structural realism); (b) to work out a new version of Humeanism, dubbed Super-Humeanism, that does without natural properties; (c) to set out an ontology of quantum physics that is an alternative to quantum state realism and that avoids any ontological dualism of particles and fields; (d) to vindicate a relationalist ontology based on point objects also in the domain of relativistic physics.

An edited collection focusing on the technology involved in enabling integration between lexical resources and semantic technologies.

Reinhardt Grossmann is one of the most sophisticated, knowledgeable and original contemporary metaphysicians. Although he was a student of Bergmann, he influenced the development of Bergmann's metaphysics considerably. No philosopher other than Grossmann defends perception to that degree against the persistent skeptical arguments. He characterizes his epistemological positions as radical empiricism and radical realism. By realism Grossmann mainly means the view that the material things we perceive exist. It is thus also an ontological position and closely related to his empiricism. Grossmann's empiricism is radical insofar as he claims that entities of all categories are perceptible, even numbers and universals. Grossmann's universal realism advocates a theory of abstract categories against the current naturalism. He distinguishes between the world and the physical universe. The latter is the domain of science; the former is the subject of ontology.

In order for information systems supporting two different organizations to interoperate, there must be an agreement as to what the words mean. There are many such agreements in place, supporting information systems interoperation in many different application areas. Most of these agreements have been created as part of diverse systems development processes, but since the advent of the Semantic Web in the late 1990s, they have been studied as a kind of software artifact in their own right, called an ontology, or description of a shared world. This book brings together developments from philosophy, artificial intelligence and information systems to formulate a collection of functional requirements for ontology development. Once the functional requirements are established, the book looks at several ontology representation languages: RDFS, OWL, Common Logic and Topic Maps, to show how these languages support the functional requirements, what deficiencies there are, and how the languages relate to each other. Besides a collection of running examples used throughout the book, the entire treatment is supported by an extended example of a hypothetical ontology for the Olympic Games presented first as a set of chapter-end exercises and then as a set of solutions which illustrate the various points made in the text in the context of a single coherent development.