Drawing Boundaries

In “On Drawing Lines on a Map” (1995), I suggested that the different ways we have of drawing lines on maps open up a new perspective on ontology, resting on a distinction between two sorts of boundaries: fiat and bona fide. “Fiat” means, roughly: human-demarcation-induced. “Bona fide” means, again roughly: a boundary constituted by some real physical discontinuity. I presented a general typology of boundaries based on this opposition and showed how it generates a corresponding typology of the different sorts of objects which boundaries determine or demarcate. In this paper, I describe how the theory of fiat boundaries has evolved since 1995, how it has been applied in areas such as property law and political geography, and how it is being used in contemporary work in formal and applied ontology, especially within the framework of Basic Formal Ontology

Digging into Business Process Meta-models: A First Ontological Analysis

While modern definitions of business processes exist and are shared in the Business Process Management community, a commonly agreed meta-model is still missing. Nonetheless, several different business process meta-models have been recently proposed and discussed in the literature, which look at business process models from different perspectives, focusing on different aspects and often using different labels for denoting the same element or element relation. In this paper, we start from elements and relations discovered inspecting the literature on business process meta-models through a systematic literature review. We then combine these elements and relations to build a business process meta-model. The obtained literature-based business process meta-model, which is on purpose built to disclose criticalities, is then inspected and discussed. The analysis reveals, besides the lack of attention to some crucial business process elements, issues and inconsistencies in the literature meta-models. An ontological analysis is finally carried out and possible solutions to the discovered issues are proposed

Novelty

Novelty, defined as the quality of being new, has always been associated with a vast range of phenomena which had never existed before. The concept is of particular relevance espe- cially in the fields of science, technology, and art, because they mutually deal with discovery, innovation, and invention. As it is apparent, the three disciplines mutually share the impor- tance of creative processes, which lie at their very core. For this reason, the main investiga- tions on novelty, both theoretical and empiri- cal, from the twentieth century onward have mainly been carried out by philosophical and psychological studies related to creativity. Novelty indeed represents one of the funda- mental criteria of creativity. Accordingly, this entry (1) begins with a general, phenomeno- logical description of novelty, (2) points out the current relevance of novelty, (3) focuses on its history by providing a theoretical framework for its understanding, (4) explores different empirical researches and cognitive models of novelty elaborated hitherto, and (5) illustrates the fundamental relation between novelty and the possible