Bottom-up construction of ontologies

Presents a particular way of building ontologies that proceeds in a bottom-up fashion. Concepts are defined in a way that mirrors the way their instances are composed out of smaller objects. The smaller objects themselves may also be modeled as being composed. Bottom-up ontologies are flexible through the use of implicit and, hence, parsimonious part-whole and subconcept-superconcept relations. The bottom-up method complements current practice, where, as a rule, ontologies are built top-down. The design method is illustrated by an example involving ontologies of pure substances at several levels of detail. It is not claimed that bottom-up construction is a generally valid recipe; indeed, such recipes are deemed uninformative or impossible. Rather, the approach is intended to enrich the ontology developer's toolki

The Logical Structure of Consciousness (behavior, personality, rationality, higher order thought, intentionality) (revised 2019)

After half a century in oblivion, the nature of consciousness is now the hottest topic in the behavioral sciences and philosophy. Beginning with the pioneering work of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the 1930’s (the Blue and Brown Books) and from the 50’s to the present by his logical successor John Searle, I have created the following table as a heuristic for furthering this study. The rows show various aspects or ways of studying and the columns show the involuntary processes and voluntary behaviors comprising the two systems (dual processes) of the Logical Structure of Consciousness (LSC), which can also be regarded as the Logical Structure of Rationality (LSR-Searle), of behavior (LSB), of personality (LSP), of reality (LSOR), of Intentionality (LSI) -the classical philosophical term, the Descriptive Psychology of Consciousness (DPC) , the Descriptive Psychology of Thought (DPT) –or better, the Language of the Descriptive Psychology of Thought (LDPT), terms introduced here and in my other very recent writings. Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019

A model for providing emotion awareness and feedback using fuzzy logic in online learning

Monitoring users’ emotive states and using that information for providing feedback and scaffolding is crucial. In the learning context, emotions can be used to increase students’ attention as well as to improve memory and reasoning. In this context, tutors should be prepared to create affective learning situations and encourage collaborative knowledge construction as well as identify those students’ feelings which hinder learning process. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to label affective behavior in educational discourse based on fuzzy logic, which enables a human or virtual tutor to capture students’ emotions, make students aware of their own emotions, assess these emotions and provide appropriate affective feedback. To that end, we propose a fuzzy classifier that provides a priori qualitative assessment and fuzzy qualifiers bound to the amounts such as few, regular and many assigned by an affective dictionary to every word. The advantage of the statistical approach is to reduce the classical pollution problem of training and analyzing the scenario using the same dataset. Our approach has been tested in a real online learning environment and proved to have a very positive influence on students’ learning performance.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Using patterns in the automatic marking of ER-Diagrams

This paper illustrates how the notion of pattern can be used in the automatic analysis and synthesis of diagrams, applied particularly to the automatic marking of ER-diagrams. The paper describes how diagram patterns fit into a general framework for diagram interpretation and provides examples of how patterns can be exploited in other fields. Diagram patterns are defined and specified within the area of ER-diagrams. The paper also shows how patterns are being exploited in a revision tool for understanding ER-diagrams

Experiments in the automatic marking of ER-Diagrams

In this paper we present an approach to the computer understanding of diagrams and show how it can be successfully applied to the automatic marking (grading) of student attempts at drawing entity-relationship (ER) diagrams. The automatic marker has been incorporated into a revision tool to enable students to practice diagramming and obtain feedback on their attempts

A Master Wittgensteinian Surveys Human Nature -A Review of Human Nature-the Categorial Framework by PMS Hacker (2010) (review revised 2019)

Materialism, reductionism, behaviorism, functionalism, dynamic systems theory and computationalism are popular views, but they were shown by Wittgenstein and more recently by Searle to be incoherent. The study of behavior encompasses all of human life but behavior is largely automatic and unconscious and even the conscious part, mostly expressed in language (which Wittgenstein equates with the mind), is not perspicuous, so it is critical to have a framework which Searle calls the Logical Structure of Rationality (LSR) and I call the Descriptive Psychology of Higher Order Thought (DPHOT). After summarizing the framework worked out by Wittgenstein and Searle, as extended by myself and by modern reasoning research, I comment on this first book in a trilogy on Human Nature by P.M.S. Hacker, the leading authority on Wittgenstein and one of the best modern philosophers. Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019