Effective and Efficient Data Access in the Versatile Web Query Language Xcerpt

Access to Web data has become an integral part of many applications and services. In the past, such data has usually been accessed through human-tailoredHTMLinterfaces.Nowadays, rich client interfaces in desktop applications or, increasingly, in browser-based clients ease data access and allow more complex client processing based on XML or RDF data retrieved throughWeb service interfaces. Convenient specifications of the data processing on the client and flexible, expressive service interfaces for data access become essential in this context.Web query languages such as XQuery, XSLT, SPARQL, or Xcerpt have been tailored specifically for such a setting: declarative and efficient access and processing ofWeb data. Xcerpt stands apart among these languages by its versatility, i.e., its ability to access not just oneWeb format but many. In this demonstration, two aspects of Xcerpt are illustrated in detail: The first part of the demonstration focuses on Xcerpt’s pattern matching constructs and rules to enable effective and versatile data access. It uses a concrete practical use case from bibliography management to illustrate these language features. Xcerpt’s visual companion language visXcerpt is used to provide an intuitive interface to both data and queries. The second part of the demonstration shows recent advancements in Xcerpt’s implementation focusing on experimental evaluation of recent complexity results and optimization techniques, as well as scalability over a number of usage scenarios and input sizes

Searching and ranking ontologies on the Semantic Web

The number of ontologies available online is increasing constantly. Tools that are capable of searching, retrieving, and ranking ontologies are becoming crucial to facilitate ontology search and reuse. In this document, we describe OntoSearch, which is a tool for capturing and searching ontologies on the Semantic web. We also briefly describe AKTiveRank which is used to rank OWL ontologies based on certain ontology-structure analysis.

Hegel in the Americas: Interpretive Assimilation and the Anticolonial Argument

This essay criticizes some strategies of Hegel scholarship, especially the non-metaphysical school and its recent metaphysical successor. My main claim is that these approaches are rhetorically opaque, and thus vulnerable to a certain anticolonial argument. In place of these strategies, I recommend and illustrate a more historically perspicuous approach that is sensitive to concerns about the role of European philosophy in the Americas

Transcriptome dynamics in the asexual cycle of the chordate Botryllus schlosseri

Background: We performed an analysis of the transcriptome during the blastogenesis of the chordate Botryllus schlosseri, focusing in particular on genes involved in cell death by apoptosis. The tunicate B. schlosseri is an ascidian forming colonies characterized by the coexistence of three blastogenetic generations: filter-feeding adults, buds on adults, and budlets on buds. Cyclically, adult tissues undergo apoptosis and are progressively resorbed and replaced by their buds originated by asexual reproduction. This is a feature of colonial tunicates, the only known chordates that can reproduce asexually. Results: Thanks to a newly developed web-based platform (http://botryllus.cribi.unipd.it), we compared the transcriptomes of the mid-cycle, the pre-take-over, and the take-over phases of the colonial blastogenetic cycle. The platform is equipped with programs for comparative analysis and allows to select the statistical stringency. We enriched the genome annotation with 11,337 new genes; 581 transcripts were resolved as complete open reading frames, translated in silico into amino acid sequences and then aligned onto the non-redundant sequence database. Significant differentially expressed genes were classified within the gene ontology categories. Among them, we recognized genes involved in apoptosis activation, de-activation, and regulation. Conclusions: With the current work, we contributed to the improvement of the first released B. schlosseri genome assembly and offer an overview of the transcriptome changes during the blastogenetic cycle, showing up- and down-regulated genes. These results are important for the comprehension of the events underlying colony growth and regression, cell proliferation, colony homeostasis, and competition among different generations

Modular Web Queries — From Rules to Stores

Even with all the progress in Semantic technology, accessing Web data remains a challenging issue with new Web query languages and approaches appearing regularly. Yet most of these languages, including W3C approaches such as XQuery and SPARQL, do little to cope with the explosion of the data size and schemata diversity and richness on the Web. In this paper we propose a straightforward step toward the improvement of this situation that is simple to realize and yet effective: Advanced module systems that make partitioning of (a) the evaluation and (b) the conceptual design of complex Web queries possible. They provide the query programmer with a powerful, but easy to use high-level abstraction for packaging, encapsulating, and reusing conceptually related parts (in our case, rules) of a Web query. The proposed module system combines ease of use thanks to a simple core concept, the partitioning of rules and their consequences in flexible “stores”, with ease of deployment thanks to a reduction semantics. We focus on extending the rule-based Semantic Web query language Xcerpt with such a module system though the same approach can be applied to other (rule-based) languages as well

Ontology ranking based on the analysis of concept structures

In view of the need to provide tools to facilitate the reuse of existing knowledge structures such as ontologies, we present in this paper a system, AKTiveRank, for the ranking of ontologies. AKTiveRank uses as input the search terms provided by a knowledge engineer and, using the output of an ontology search engine, ranks the ontologies. We apply a number of classical metrics in an attempt to investigate their appropriateness for ranking ontologies, and compare the results with a questionnaire-based human study. Our results show that AKTiveRank will have great utility although there is potential for improvement

Linking with Meaning: Ontological Hypertext for Scholars

The links in ontological hypermedia are defined according to the relationships between real-world objects. An ontology that models the significant objects in a scholar’s world can be used toward producing a consistently interlinked research literature. Currently the papers that are available online are mainly divided between subject- and publisher-specific archives, with little or no interoperability. This paper addresses the issue of ontological interlinking, presenting two experimental systems whose hypertext links embody ontologies based on the activities of researchers and scholars

Genetic Phenomenology and Empirical Naturalism

Husserl’s phenomenology is developed in explicit contrast to naturalism. At the same time, various scholars have attempted to overcome this opposition by naturalizing consciousness and phenomenology. In this paper, I argue that, in order to confront the issue of the relationship between phenomenology and naturalism, we must distinguish between different forms of naturalism. In fact, Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is developed in contrast to a metaphysical form of naturalism, which conceives of nature as a mind-independent ontological domain that can be known as it is “in itself”, independently of the cognitive relationship. At the same time, I argue that the genetic development of phenomenology, through the investigation of the temporal structure of experiences, leads to an empirical form of naturalism, which conceives of nature as the objective pole in a process of co-constitution of the subject and the object of experience. Winner of the Philosophy Essay Prize “Vittorio Sainati” XIIth Editio

Two Disputes of Methods Three Constructivisms and Three Liberalisms. Part I

The paper proposes to reconsider the methodology and history of economics radically, whether present day mainstream or heterodox versions of it. The profession of economists must definitely abandon Cartesian dualism and adopt Vygotskian constructivism. In fact constructivist economics already existed in the past and was cognitively very successful and socially very useful. It was the economics of Gustav Schmoller’s historico-ethical school and the institutionalist economics of John R. Commons, traditions of which are totally ignored by the contemporary community of economists. The former tradition was based on Dilthey’s hermeneutics and the latter on Peirce’s pragmatism. It is worth to underline that hermeneutics and pragmatism are both predecessors of Vygotskian constructivism. During the last two decades a lot was written by economists on pragmatist, constructivist and discursive approaches to the methodology and history of economics, but those who wrote on these topics viewed them from the dualistic point of view. My paper is an appeal to economists to reconsider Methodenstreit. The dispute of methods between Schmoller and Menger can be considered as a repetition of a similar dispute taking place more than two hundred years earlier between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes. Schmoller-Menger dispute started soon after the beginning of the institutionalisation of experimentally-oriented economics which happened with the creation in 1873 of the Vereinf?r Sozialpolitik. Boyle-Hobbes dispute started in 1660, when the Royal Society of London had been founded, the cradle of the institution of science. Schmoller was one of the creators of the Verein, and Boyle was one of the founders of the Royal Society. The activities of both societies were similar in several respects: they represented efforts to collect data, working out of detailed reports and collective evaluation of obtained results. For Hobbes, as for Menger, the model of ‘science’ was geometry. Boyle and Schmoller privileged collecting and analysing data. Boyle did win the dispute, Schmoller did loose. It happened because of different attitudes of powerful groups in societies towards natural scientific experimental research and experimental social research. They were interested in the former, and they saw much more danger than benefit for them in the latter. On the contrary, they were interested in abstract theoretical constructions justifying the market vision of society and laissez-faire. This kind of constructions corresponded to deeply enrooted scholastic traditions of European universities to teach theology and linked with it philosophy. In the framework of these traditions, mathematics was considered as a summit of the scientific approach. On the one hand, the adoption of constructivism by economists would turn their discipline into a science functionally close to natural sciences. On the other hand the Vygotskian constructivism, as a social and political philosophy, once accepted by economists, may lead them to become preachers of the communitarian liberalism with its emphasis on social responsibility, deliberative democracy, and discourse ethics

Automatic ontology mapping for agent communication

Agent communication languages such as ACL and KQML provide a standard for agent communication. These languages enable an agent to specify the intention and the content of a message as well as the protocol, the language, and the ontology that are used. For the protocol and the language some standards are available and should be known by the communicating agents. The ontology used in a communication depends on the subject of the communication. Since the number of subjects is almost infinite and since the concepts used for a subject can be described by different ontologies, the development of generally accepted standards will take a long time. This lack of standardization, which hampers communication and collaboration between agents, is known as the interoperability problem. To overcome the interoperability problem, agents must be able to establish a mapping between their ontologies. This paper investigates a new approach to the interoperability problem. The proposed approach requires neither a correspondence between concepts used in the ontologies nor a correspondence between the structure of the ontologies. It only requires that some instances of the subject about which the agents try to communicate are known by both agents.economics of technology ;