The unacknowledged legacy

This paper presents a critical discussion of the treatment of mimetic art, and particularly poetry and the theatre, in the work of the Athenian philosopher Plato (427-347 BC). It centres on Plato's discussion of the corrupting powers of the arts in the Republic, and the implications that his fierce attack on poetry and theatre have for his construction of the ideal polity. The legacy of Platonic ideas in later elaborations of the corrupting power of the arts is discussed. Furthermore, the paper investigates the relationship between current debates on cultural policy and the Platonic idea that the transformative powers of the arts ought to be harnessed by the state to promote a just society. The conclusion thus reached is that “instrumental cultural policy”, rather then being a modern invention, was in fact first theorized precisely in Plato's Republic

The Potato Ontology: Delimitation of the Domain, Modelling Concepts, and Prospects of Performance.

The ever increasing amount of data gathered by more growers in more years offers possibilities to add value. Therefore a common and controlled vocabulary of the potato domain that describes concepts, attributes, and the relations between them in a formal way using a standardised knowledge representation is being developed: a potato ontology. The advantage is that all possible stakeholders will be able to understand the data expressed by this ontology and that software applications can process them automatically. This paper describes the procedures to establish such an ontology where competency questions formulated by stakeholders and potential users take a central position. The three main classes are those used in crop ecology: Crop, Environment and Management