Constitute: The world’s constitutions to read, search, and compare

Constitutional design and redesign is constant. Over the last 200 years, countries have replaced their constitutions an average of every 19 years and some have amended them almost yearly. A basic problem in the drafting of these documents is the search and analysis of model text deployed in other jurisdictions. Traditionally, this process has been ad hoc and the results suboptimal. As a result, drafters generally lack systematic information about the institutional options and choices available to them. In order to address this informational need, the investigators developed a web application, Constitute [online at http://www.constituteproject.org], with the use of semantic technologies. Constitute provides searchable access to the world’s constitutions using the conceptualization, texts, and data developed by the Comparative Constitutions Project. An OWL ontology represents 330 ‘‘topics’’ – e.g. right to health – with which the investigators have tagged relevant provisions of nearly all constitutions in force as of September of 2013. The tagged texts were then converted to an RDF representation using R2RML mappings and Capsenta’s Ultrawrap. The portal implements semantic search features to allow constitutional drafters to read, search, and compare the world’s constitutions. The goal of the project is to improve the efficiency and systemization of constitutional design and, thus, to support the independence and self-reliance of constitutional drafters.Governmen

Locke on Real Essences, Intelligibility, and Natural Kinds

In this paper I criticize the interpretations of John Locke on natural kinds offered by Matthew Stuart and Pauline Phemister who argue that Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding allows for natural kinds based on similar real essences. By contrast, I argue for a conventionalist reading of Locke by reinterpreting his account of the status of real essences within the Essay and arguing that Locke denies that the new science of mechanism can justify the claim that similarities in corpuscular structure imply similarities in sensible qualities. I argue further that Locke rejects as meaningless any talk of kinds that appeals to similarities among real essences. On my reading of Locke, similarities in real essences are not only irrelevant to species, but natural kind theories based on themare unintelligible

OHMI: The Ontology of Host-Microbiome Interactions

Host-microbiome interactions (HMIs) are critical for the modulation of biological processes and are associated with several diseases, and extensive HMI studies have generated large amounts of data. We propose that the logical representation of the knowledge derived from these data and the standardized representation of experimental variables and processes can foster integration of data and reproducibility of experiments and thereby further HMI knowledge discovery. A community-based Ontology of Host-Microbiome Interactions (OHMI) was developed following the OBO Foundry principles. OHMI leverages established ontologies to create logically structured representations of microbiomes, microbial taxonomy, host species, host anatomical entities, and HMIs under different conditions and associated study protocols and types of data analysis and experimental results

Plato and Trumpism: Look at Trumpism via the lens of Plato’s Republic

This paper offers Plato\u27s Republic as a lens to understand Trump Movement in today\u27s America. On this basis, my paper has been divided into three parts. The first presents a political model to explain the underlying force beneath the degeneration of the political regime in Plato\u27s theory. The second applies that model to conclude political features of populist movements and psychological traits of the tyrant. The last part applies above conclusions to offer a way to interpret the formation of Trumpism and offer possible solution to it

Who owns native nature? Discourses of rights to land, culture, and knowledge in New Zealand

Michael Brown famously asked ‘Who owns native culture?’ This paper revisits that question by analyzing what happens to culture when the culturally defined boundary between it and nature becomes salient in the context of disputes between indigenous and settler populations. My case study is the dispute between the New Zealand government and Maori tribal groupings concerning ownership of the foreshore and seabed. Having been granted the right to test their claims in court in 2003, Maori groups were enraged when the government legislated the right out of existence in 2004. Though the reasons for doing so were clearly political, contrasting cultural assumptions appeared to set Maori and Pakeha (New Zealanders of European origin) at odds. While couching ownership of part of nature as an IPR issue may seem counter-intuitive, I argue that as soon as a property claim destabilizes the nature/culture boundary, IPR discourse becomes pertinent

Unmasking the Regulatory Burden for Individual Australian Residents

The legislation defines the roles that individuals play, but it causes confusion when a role has different definitions in the same jurisdiction. In Australia, the welfare. taxation and immigration legislation each provide a different definition of an Australian resident. This paper applies the GovUI-Onto, a new method developed to conceptualise and model the implementation of legislation using government user interfaces, to model and compare the regulatory burden imposed on individuals being assessed as Australian residents in different settings. Not surprisingly, the research indicates that there may be a higher regulatory burden for individuals seeking benefits and services from the government, than those who will be required to pay money to the government. The research also identifies how a whole-of-government view of a role, such as an Australian resident, can be developed and used in harmonization exercises to reduce regulatory inconsistencies

he true complexity of product representation in the semantic web

The ontological representation of products and services is a core challenge on the road to business applications for the Semantic Web. This will not only help search engines provide more precise product search for human users, but can be expected to support a much higher degree of business process automation in general, especially in all tasks that involve content integration. In industrial data interchange between business partners, the state of the art is the use of common XML schema definitions (e.g. BMEcat) for the representation of structure and the use of classification schemes (e.g. UNSPSC or eCl@ss) for the representation of product semantics. This current practice, however, takes place in well-defined contexts known to both the publisher of data and the recipient, which allows even the usage of the same standard with varying semantics in distinct settings. In a Semantic Web context in contrast, the same document must be machine-readable (1) by a huge number of different partners (2) for a multiplicity of purposes. In other words, the data recipient and the data usage are not predetermined, which makes it much more difficult to reach consensus e.g. about suitable product classes. This paper develops the requirements for product representation in the Semantic Web and evaluates existing alternatives