A Language for Inconsistency-Tolerant Ontology Mapping

Ontology alignment plays a key role in enabling interoperability among various data sources present in the web. The nature of the world is such, that the same concepts differ in meaning, often so slightly, which makes it difficult to relate these concepts. It is the omni-present heterogeneity that is at the core of the web. The research work presented in this dissertation, is driven by the goal of providing a robust ontology alignment language for the semantic web, as we show that description logics based alignment languages are not suitable for aligning ontologies. The adoption of the semantic web technologies has been consistently on the rise over the past decade, and it continues to show promise. The core component of the semantic web is the set of knowledge representation languages -- mainly the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards Web Ontology Language (OWL), Resource Description Framework (RDF), and Rule Interchange Format (RIF). While these languages have been designed in order to be suitable for the openness and extensibility of the web, they lack certain features which we try to address in this dissertation. One such missing component is the lack of non-monotonic features, in the knowledge representation languages, that enable us to perform common sense reasoning. For example, OWL supports the open world assumption (OWA), which means that knowledge about everything is assumed to be possibly incomplete at any point of time. However, experience has shown that there are situations that require us to assume that certain parts of the knowledge base are complete. Employing the Closed World Assumption (CWA) helps us achieve this. Circumscription is a very well-known approach towards CWA, which provides closed world semantics by employing the idea of minimal models with respect to certain predicates which are closed. We provide the formal semantics of the notion of Grounded Circumscription, which is an extension of circumscription with desirable properties like decidability. We also provide a tableaux calculus to reason over knowledge bases under the notion of grounded circumscription. Another form of common sense logic, is default logic. Default logic provides a way to specify rules that, by default, hold in most cases but not necessarily in all cases. The classic example of such a rule is: If something is a bird then it flies. The power of defaults comes from the ability of the logic to handle exceptions to the default rules. For example, a bird will be assumed to fly by default unless it is an exception, i.e. it belongs to a class of birds that do not fly, like penguins. Interestingly, this property of defaults can be utilized to create mappings between concepts of different ontologies (knowledge bases). We provide a new semantics for the integration of defaults in description logics and show that it improves upon previously known results in literature. In this study, we give various examples to show the utility and advantages of using a default logic based ontology alignment language. We provide the semantics and decidability results of a default based mapping language for tractable fragments of description logics (or OWL). Furthermore, we provide a proof of concept system and qualitative analysis of the results obtained from the system when compared to that of traditional mapping repair techniques

A polynomial Time Subsumption Algorithm for Nominal Safe ELO_bot under Rational Closure

Description Logics (DLs) under Rational Closure (RC) is a well-known framework for non-monotonic reasoning in DLs. In this paper, we address the concept subsumption decision problem under RC for nominal safe ELO_bot, a notable and practically important DL representative of the OWL 2 profile OWL 2 EL. Our contribution here is to define a polynomial time subsumption procedure for nominal safe ELO_bot under RC that relies entirely on a series of classical, monotonic EL_bot subsumption tests. Therefore, any existing classical monotonic EL_bot reasoner can be used as a black box to implement our method. We then also adapt the method to one of the known extensions of RC for DLs, namely Defeasible Inheritance-based DLs without losing the computational tractability

Multispace & Multistructure. Neutrosophic Transdisciplinarity (100 Collected Papers of Sciences), Vol. IV

The fourth volume, in my book series of “Collected Papers”, includes 100 published and unpublished articles, notes, (preliminary) drafts containing just ideas to be further investigated, scientific souvenirs, scientific blogs, project proposals, small experiments, solved and unsolved problems and conjectures, updated or alternative versions of previous papers, short or long humanistic essays, letters to the editors - all collected in the previous three decades (1980-2010) – but most of them are from the last decade (2000-2010), some of them being lost and found, yet others are extended, diversified, improved versions. This is an eclectic tome of 800 pages with papers in various fields of sciences, alphabetically listed, such as: astronomy, biology, calculus, chemistry, computer programming codification, economics and business and politics, education and administration, game theory, geometry, graph theory, information fusion, neutrosophic logic and set, non-Euclidean geometry, number theory, paradoxes, philosophy of science, psychology, quantum physics, scientific research methods, and statistics. It was my preoccupation and collaboration as author, co-author, translator, or cotranslator, and editor with many scientists from around the world for long time. Many topics from this book are incipient and need to be expanded in future explorations

“But Who, We?”: Derrida on Non-Human Others

In this dissertation I establish the possibility of social and ethical relationships with non-human natural (and in particular inanimate) beings. I do so based on the work of 20th century French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In chapter 1 I discuss the relatively sparse secondary literature that addresses the intersection between Derrida\u27s work and environmental philosophy. I also go over some textual indications that show that Derrida has been concerned with non-human beings throughout his career. In chapters 2 and 3 I establish the impossibility of conclusively excluding any kind of being from the purview of ethical responsibility. While chapter 2 develops the nature of Derrida\u27s ethics, chapter 3 ties this conception of ethics back to more theoretical considerations that we find in Derrida\u27s texts. Chapters 4 to 6 serve to illustrate in a more positive fashion how Derrida might help us to understand the possibility of social and ethical relationships with inanimate beings. Chapter 4 focuses on the notion of the trace in order to show that the presence qua absence that characterizes our experience of human persons can be discerned in our relationships to inanimate beings as well. Chapter 5 focuses on Derrida\u27s discussion of a human corpse as neither simply alive nor simply dead. I argue that this experience of life/death is possible with regard to non-human inanimate beings as well. Finally, in chapter 6 I argue for the possibility of sharing a common world with non-human (including inanimate) beings based on Derrida\u27s conception of habitat and of the world as fractured and constructed