Metaphysical and ontological debates, concerning what exists and the nature of reality, are perennial features of the philosophical landscape. However, some have argued that ontological debates are non-substantive, pointless, trivial, incoherent, or impossible. Debates about whether tables exist, for example, or about the nature of reality, are taken to be in some way deficient. This has led to a burgeoning literature studying the nature of metaphysical and ontological disputes themselves. One major debate within this context concerns the language of ontology. The central question is whether the nature of language influences or limits our ability to engage productively in ontological disputes. While we typically think that our language describes the world, or at least can accurately describe the world, there have been many who have argued that the nature of language inherently influences and limits our attempts to understand the nature of reality-that our claims about what exists are, in fact, merely a reflection of how we happen to speak or think. The Language of Ontology collects chapters from established participants in the debate alongside new voices, to explore the range of issues relating to our ability or inability to get beyond the limits of our language.

The book highlights the concept of ontology, relationship between language and ontology, the distinction between ontology and reality, the role of linguistic philosophers in dealing with ontology etc. Apart from these, the eminent scholars address themselves with the ontology behind the value of valuation, exclusion and discrimination, inter-religious dialogue, Indian theories of language, values in cinema, poetic language etc.

With the collapse of the Han dynasty in 220 C.E., an entire system of state and intellectual organization fell apart. The brilliant Wang Bi and his generation of young scholars grew up in a no-man's land without teachers and orthodoxy. Defying the established school divisions, they set out on a vigorous and daring new philosophical inquiry which came to be known as Xuanxue, the "Scholarly Exploration of the Dark." They found "subtle pointers" in the Laozi, the Book of Changes, and the Analects of Confucius about the inequity of language and the ensuing need to proceed by "subtle" indications that ultimately led to a philosophy of Being. In this book, Rudolf G. Wagner shows how Wang Bi's sophisticated analysis of "subtle pointers" in the language of the Laozi developed into an ontology that served as the basis for a political philosophy of the ruler/subject relationship and a guide for the public performance of an enlightened ruler. Wang Bi's work initiated the reading of the Laozi, the Book of Changes and the Analects as philosophical texts and has had a lasting impact on Chinese philosophy.

Ontologies tend to be found everywhere. They are viewed as the silver bullet for many applications, such as database integration, peer-to-peer systems, e-commerce, semantic web services, or social networks. However, in open or evolving systems, such as the semantic web, different parties would, in general, adopt different ontologies. Thus, merely using ontologies, like using XML, does not reduce heterogeneity: it just raises heterogeneity problems to a higher level. Euzenat and Shvaiko’s book is devoted to ontology matching as a solution to the semantic heterogeneity problem faced by computer systems. Ontology matching aims at finding correspondences between semantically related entities of different ontologies. These correspondences may stand for equivalence as well as other relations, such as consequence, subsumption, or disjointness, between ontology entities. Many different matching solutions have been proposed so far from various viewpoints, e.g., databases, information systems, and artificial intelligence. The second edition of Ontology Matching has been thoroughly revised and updated to reflect the most recent advances in this quickly developing area, which resulted in more than 150 pages of new content. In particular, the book includes a new chapter dedicated to the methodology for performing ontology matching. It also covers emerging topics, such as data interlinking, ontology partitioning and pruning, context-based matching, matcher tuning, alignment debugging, and user involvement in matching, to mention a few. More than 100 state-of-the-art matching systems and frameworks were reviewed. With Ontology Matching, researchers and practitioners will find a reference book that presents currently available work in a uniform framework. In particular, the work and the techniques presented in this book can be equally applied to database schema matching, catalog integration, XML schema matching and other related problems. The objectives of the book include presenting (i) the state of the art and (ii) the latest research results in ontology matching by providing a systematic and detailed account of matching techniques and matching systems from theoretical, practical and application perspectives.

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.

The ontology of evolution unveiled the nature of evolution. It covers from the evolution of living beings to the evolution of cultures. The ontological structure of evolution and the evolution laws discovered set the basis for grounded forecasts. It describes the ontological logical structure of human evolution and its deeds. The Unicist Ontology of Evolution is an approach to nature's "operational system." It describes the metamodel of nature which is abstract, fuzzy and law-driven. The discovery of the Ontogenetic Intelligence set the grounds for the natural evolution laws that changed the paradigms in the understanding of human nature. Ontogenetic intelligence provides the basic rules to adapt to an environment. It sustains the living being's unstable equilibrium. When, for any reasons, the ontogenetic intelligence is inhibited, the living being loses its equilibrium and its survival is endangered. The unicist ontology of evolution explains and predicts the evolution of living beings, their produces and their actions in a unified field, ruled by concepts and their natural laws. The research of the unicist ontology of evolution did not enter the field of the origin of life or the origin of the universe. The purpose of the research was to discover the origin of the rules of evolution, to diagnose and influence it. The development of this theory started in 1976 and ended in 2003 with the discovery of the origin of fallacies. Fallacies have been and remain a major obstacle to overcome for the understanding of institutions, countries and individuals. The discovery of the unicist laws of evolution opened new frontiers in the field of diagnoses and prognoses of individuals, institutions andcountries by using logical inference models. This theory enables the analysis of and influence upon complex realities. Its reliability has been proven in its application during the last three decades.

Researchers and professionals

No detailed description available for "Linguistic Frameworks and Ontology".

As the (in)famous definition states: "An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization". However, an ontology is also a philosophical theory of existence, a knowledge management resource, a database schema, or a type of knowledge representation artefact on the semantic web. Over the years the term 'ontology' has been used in so many different ways that one can no longer be sure what is meant by it at any given occasion. This book clarifies the role ontologies play in knowledge representation; it discusses the distinctions with their use in philosophy, gives insight in the features, rationale and limitations of the OWL 2 web ontology language, and provides a critical review of methodologies and design principles advocated to improve the quality of ontologies. It covers both theory and practice of knowledge acquisition, representation and ontologies; it emphasises human understanding as knowledge structuring principle, and demonstrates this approach in the development of a core ontology of basic legal concepts (LKIF Core) and in the exploration of expressive ontology design patterns for the representation of social reality, change and causation, actions and transactions. In doing so it contributes to a better understanding of the representation of ontologies; or rather, what it means to do ontology representation.