Two Approaches to Ontology Aggregation Based on Axiom Weakening

Axiom weakening is a novel technique that allows for fine-grained repair of inconsistent ontologies. In a multi-agent setting, integrating ontologies corresponding to multiple agents may lead to inconsistencies. Such inconsistencies can be resolved after the integrated ontology has been built, or their generation can be prevented during ontology generation. We implement and compare these two approaches. First, we study how to repair an inconsistent ontology resulting from a voting-based aggregation of views of heterogeneous agents. Second, we prevent the generation of inconsistencies by letting the agents engage in a turn-based rational protocol about the axioms to be added to the integrated ontology. We instantiate the two approaches using real-world ontologies and compare them by measuring the levels of satisfaction of the agents w.r.t. the ontology obtained by the two procedures

Blending under deconstruction

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Why we should see international law as a structure: Unpicking international law’s ontology and agency

This article identifies how three dominant ideas of international law (as a process, an institution and a practice) see its agency, concluding that all three share a reluctance to see international law as doing anything more than enabling the operation of other actors, forces or structures. This article argues that we should see international law as a structure because it possesses both the surface structure of rules, principles, processes, personnel and material elements of the international legal system and a deep structure of values that sits deep within our subconscious. As Shklar’s idea of legalism shows us, legalism plays a powerful role in shaping all our understandings of ourselves and the world that surrounds us. Seeing international law as a structure enables us to see how it locates actors within a social hierarchy and how it behaves in similar ways to recognised structures like capitalism and racism

Upward Refinement for Conceptual Blending in Description Logic — An ASP-based Approach and Case Study in EL++—

Conceptual blending is understood to be a process that serves a variety of cognitive purposes, including creativity, and has been highly influential in cognitive linguistics. In this line of thinking, human creativity is modeled as a blending process that takes different mental spaces as input and combines them into a new mental space, called a blend. According to this form of combinatorial creativity, a blend is constructed by taking the existing commonalities among the input mental spaces—known as the generic space—into account, and by projecting their structure in a selective way. Since input spaces for interesting blends are often initially incompatible, a generalisation step is needed before they can be blended. In this paper, we apply this idea to blend input spaces specified in the description logic EL++ and propose an upward refinement operator for generalising EL++ concepts. We show how the generalisation operator is translated to Answer Set Programming (ASP) in order to implement a search process that finds possible generalisations of input concepts. We exemplify our approach in the domain of computer icons.COINVENT European Commission FP7 - 611553Peer reviewe

Metaphor in Analytic Philosophy and Cognitive Science

This article surveys theories of metaphor in analytic philosophy and cognitive science. In particular, it focuses on contemporary semantic, pragmatic and non-cognitivist theories of linguistic metaphor and on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory advanced by George Lakoff and his school. Special attention is given to the mechanisms that are shared by nearly all these approaches, i.e. mechanisms of interaction and mapping between conceptual domains. Finally, the article discusses several recent attempts to combine these theories of linguistic and conceptual metaphor into a unitary account

Logic-based Technologies for Intelligent Systems: State of the Art and Perspectives

Together with the disruptive development of modern sub-symbolic approaches to artificial intelligence (AI), symbolic approaches to classical AI are re-gaining momentum, as more and more researchers exploit their potential to make AI more comprehensible, explainable, and therefore trustworthy. Since logic-based approaches lay at the core of symbolic AI, summarizing their state of the art is of paramount importance now more than ever, in order to identify trends, benefits, key features, gaps, and limitations of the techniques proposed so far, as well as to identify promising research perspectives. Along this line, this paper provides an overview of logic-based approaches and technologies by sketching their evolution and pointing out their main application areas. Future perspectives for exploitation of logic-based technologies are discussed as well, in order to identify those research fields that deserve more attention, considering the areas that already exploit logic-based approaches as well as those that are more likely to adopt logic-based approaches in the future

Legal Reasoning: How Well-Known Marks are Positioned Through Legal Positivism

Legal protection for well-known mark needs to be examined. Indonesia has tried to conform its legal system with international law, most notably the Paris Convention and the TRIPS Agreement. However, the court’s decision indicates that the well-known mark remains unfavourable. This paper aimed to analyse judges’ rationale when they rejected a lawsuit against a well-known trademark in Indonesia which was the trademark dispute of “Starbucks” and Pierre “Cardin”. This study was conducted using legal research methods and it examined legal materials from judges’ decisions and literature review. Therefore, knowing the judge’s rationale for dismissing the claim is essential. In the first case, the plaintiff’s documented evidence was insufficient to establish the respondent’s bad faith, but the judge’s justification for rejecting the lawsuit was insufficient either. Meanwhile, in the second case, the judge denied the claim based on ne bis in idem, which aims to reach legal certainty, so the judge can lean more toward positivism. The positivism requires clear rules so as not to cause multiple interpretations. However, trademark and geographical indication law does not give complete regulations on well-known marks. As a result, problems and conflicts frequently arise in practice when it comes to the protection of well-known marks

Legal Reasoning: How Well-Known Marks are Positioned Through Legal Positivism

Legal protection for well-known mark needs to be examined. Indonesia has tried to conform its legal system with international law, most notably the Paris Convention and the TRIPS Agreement. However, the court’s decision indicates that the well-known mark remains unfavourable. This paper aimed to analyse judges’ rationale when they rejected a lawsuit against a well-known trademark in Indonesia which was the trademark dispute of “Starbucks” and Pierre “Cardin”. This study was conducted using legal research methods and it examined legal materials from judges’ decisions and literature review. Therefore, knowing the judge’s rationale for dismissing the claim is essential. In the first case, the plaintiff’s documented evidence was insufficient to establish the respondent’s bad faith, but the judge’s justification for rejecting the lawsuit was insufficient either. Meanwhile, in the second case, the judge denied the claim based on ne bis in idem, which aims to reach legal certainty, so the judge can lean more toward positivism. The positivism requires clear rules so as not to cause multiple interpretations. However, trademark and geographical indication law does not give complete regulations on well-known marks. As a result, problems and conflicts frequently arise in practice when it comes to the protection of well-known marks

Verbal Sparring and Apologetic Points: Politeness in Gendered Argumentation Contexts

This essay argues that ideals of cooperation or adversariality in argumentation are not equally attainable for women. Women in argumentation contexts face oppressive limitations undermining argument success because their authority is undermined by gendered norms of politeness. Women endorsing or, alternatively, transgressing feminine norms of politeness typically defend their authority in argumentation contexts. And yet, defending authority renders it less legitimate. My argument focuses on women in philosophy but bears the implication that other masculine dis- course contexts present similar double binds that urge social and political change