A formal model for fuzzy ontologies.

Au Yeung Ching Man.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-110).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Abstract --- p.iAcknowledgement --- p.ivChapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- The Semantic Web and Ontologies --- p.3Chapter 1.2 --- Motivations --- p.5Chapter 1.2.1 --- Fuzziness of Concepts --- p.6Chapter 1.2.2 --- Typicality of Objects --- p.6Chapter 1.2.3 --- Context and Its Effect on Reasoning --- p.8Chapter 1.3 --- Objectives --- p.9Chapter 1.4 --- Contributions --- p.10Chapter 1.5 --- Structure of the Thesis --- p.11Chapter 2 --- Background Study --- p.13Chapter 2.1 --- The Semantic Web --- p.14Chapter 2.2 --- Ontologies --- p.16Chapter 2.3 --- Description Logics --- p.20Chapter 2.4 --- Fuzzy Set Theory --- p.23Chapter 2.5 --- Concepts and Categorization in Cognitive Psychology --- p.25Chapter 2.5.1 --- Theory of Concepts --- p.26Chapter 2.5.2 --- Goodness of Example versus Degree of Typicality --- p.28Chapter 2.5.3 --- Similarity between Concepts --- p.29Chapter 2.5.4 --- Context and Context Effects --- p.31Chapter 2.6 --- Handling of Uncertainty in Ontologies and Description Logics --- p.33Chapter 2.7 --- Typicality in Models for Knowledge Representation --- p.35Chapter 2.8 --- Semantic Similarity in Ontologies and the Semantic Web --- p.39Chapter 2.9 --- Contextual Reasoning --- p.41Chapter 3 --- A Formal Model of Ontology --- p.44Chapter 3.1 --- Rationale --- p.45Chapter 3.2 --- Concepts --- p.47Chapter 3.3 --- Characteristic Vector and Property Vector --- p.47Chapter 3.4 --- Subsumption of Concepts --- p.49Chapter 3.5 --- Likeliness of an Individual in a Concept --- p.51Chapter 3.6 --- Prototype Vector and Typicality --- p.54Chapter 3.7 --- An Example --- p.59Chapter 3.8 --- Similarity between Concepts --- p.61Chapter 3.9 --- Context and Contextualization of Ontology --- p.65Chapter 3.9.1 --- Formal Definitions --- p.67Chapter 3.9.2 --- Contextualization of an Ontology --- p.69Chapter 3.9.3 --- "Contextualized Subsumption Relations, Likeliness, Typicality and Similarity" --- p.71Chapter 4 --- Discussions and Analysis --- p.73Chapter 4.1 --- Properties of the Formal Model for Fuzzy Ontologies --- p.73Chapter 4.2 --- Likeliness and Typicality --- p.78Chapter 4.3 --- Comparison between the Proposed Model and Related Works --- p.81Chapter 4.3.1 --- Comparison with Traditional Ontology Models --- p.81Chapter 4.3.2 --- Comparison with Fuzzy Ontologies and DLs --- p.82Chapter 4.3.3 --- Comparison with Ontologies modeling Typicality of Objects --- p.83Chapter 4.3.4 --- Comparison with Ontologies modeling Context --- p.84Chapter 4.3.5 --- Limitations of the Proposed Model --- p.85Chapter 4.4 --- "Significance of Modeling Likeliness, Typicality and Context in Ontologies" --- p.86Chapter 4.5 --- Potential Application of the Model --- p.88Chapter 4.5.1 --- Searching in the Semantic Web --- p.88Chapter 4.5.2 --- Benefits of the Formal Model of Ontology --- p.90Chapter 5 --- Conclusions and Future Work --- p.91Chapter 5.1 --- Conclusions --- p.91Chapter 5.2 --- Future Research Directions --- p.93Publications --- p.96Bibliography --- p.9

Formal thought disorder and logical form: A symbolic computational model of terminological knowledge.

Although formal thought disorder (FTD) has been for long a clinical label in the assessment of some psychiatric disorders, in particular of schizophrenia, it remains a source of controversy, mostly because it is hard to say what exactly the “formal” in FTD refers to. We see anomalous processing of terminological knowledge, a core construct of human knowledge in general, behind FTD symptoms and we approach this anomaly from a strictly formal perspective. More specifically, we present here a symbolic computational model of storage in, and activation of, a human semantic network, or semantic memory, whose core element is logical form; this is normalized by description logic (DL), namely by CL, a DL-based language – Conception Language – designed to formalize conceptualization from the viewpoint of individual cognitive agency. In this model, disruptions in the rule-based implementation of the logical form account for the apparently semantic anomalies symptomatic of FTD, which are detected by means of a CL-based algorithmic assessment

Proceedings of the GIS Research UK 18th Annual Conference GISRUK 2010

This volume holds the papers from the 18th annual GIS Research UK (GISRUK). This year the conference, hosted at University College London (UCL), from Wednesday 14 to Friday 16 April 2010. The conference covered the areas of core geographic information science research as well as applications domains such as crime and health and technological developments in LBS and the geoweb. UCL’s research mission as a global university is based around a series of Grand Challenges that affect us all, and these were accommodated in GISRUK 2010. The overarching theme this year was “Global Challenges”, with specific focus on the following themes: * Crime and Place * Environmental Change * Intelligent Transport * Public Health and Epidemiology * Simulation and Modelling * London as a global city * The geoweb and neo-geography * Open GIS and Volunteered Geographic Information * Human-Computer Interaction and GIS Traditionally, GISRUK has provided a platform for early career researchers as well as those with a significant track record of achievement in the area. As such, the conference provides a welcome blend of innovative thinking and mature reflection. GISRUK is the premier academic GIS conference in the UK and we are keen to maintain its outstanding record of achievement in developing GIS in the UK and beyond

Concepts and Tools for Web-based Community Building

This research project explores a new approach to online community building and community health promotion. It is based on the concept of salutogenesis. Salutogenesis is a proactive approach to community health promotion which seeks preventative measures based around social, cultural and natural activities. This is in stark contrast with the traditional reactionary corrective and curative culture of public health care. The main aim of this thesis is the identification of the key salutogenic community building processes. The objective is to materialize the design criteria to develop a comprehensive community building tool which may be used for salutogenic community health promotion. The other objective of this research is the synthesis of the salutogenic Sense of Coherence (comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness), together with the criteria for community building (collaboration, planning and defining). An incentive for pursuing a philosophical line of inquiry is the adaptation of process philosophy into a coherent conceptual framework for epistemological objectivity. Process philosophy as an analytico-synthetic tool is a departure from traditional research paradigms because it does not posit a world of objects, like substance ontology. Process ontology offers rich insight into social practices since they are analytical processes. In spite of its clear and commonsensical intelligibility and enormous exegetic capacity, process ontology or action-based world views remain largely unexplored in Information Design (ID). My contribution is two-fold; the identification of generic salutogenic community building processes and the adaptation of process ontology into a conceptual framework for an analytico-synthetic methodology. This thesis is explanatory account of the salutogenic community building processes at a fundamental level and a non-composition, non-substance semantico-ontological framework is put to use. This research is based two qualitative surveys. The first is a preliminary survey about the extant online communities and tools, and the second is based on data collected in a 9 month ethnographic study of the pratices of a Norwegian-based non-government organization involved in community health promotion

Ontological foundations for structural conceptual models

In this thesis, we aim at contributing to the theory of conceptual modeling and ontology representation. Our main objective here is to provide ontological foundations for the most fundamental concepts in conceptual modeling. These foundations comprise a number of ontological theories, which are built on established work on philosophical ontology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of language and linguistics. Together these theories amount to a system of categories and formal relations known as a foundational ontolog

Computational Complexity of Strong Admissibility for Abstract Dialectical Frameworks

Abstract dialectical frameworks (ADFs) have been introduced as a formalism for modeling and evaluating argumentation allowing general logical satisfaction conditions. Different criteria used to settle the acceptance of arguments arecalled semantics. Semantics of ADFs have so far mainly been defined based on the concept of admissibility. Recently, the notion of strong admissibility has been introduced for ADFs. In the current work we study the computational complexityof the following reasoning tasks under strong admissibility semantics. We address 1. the credulous/skeptical decision problem; 2. the verification problem; 3. the strong justification problem; and 4. the problem of finding a smallest witness of strong justification of a queried argument