Bottom-up construction of ontologies

Presents a particular way of building ontologies that proceeds in a bottom-up fashion. Concepts are defined in a way that mirrors the way their instances are composed out of smaller objects. The smaller objects themselves may also be modeled as being composed. Bottom-up ontologies are flexible through the use of implicit and, hence, parsimonious part-whole and subconcept-superconcept relations. The bottom-up method complements current practice, where, as a rule, ontologies are built top-down. The design method is illustrated by an example involving ontologies of pure substances at several levels of detail. It is not claimed that bottom-up construction is a generally valid recipe; indeed, such recipes are deemed uninformative or impossible. Rather, the approach is intended to enrich the ontology developer's toolki

Horizontal Symmetry from the Bottom Up

A general method to derive horizontal symmetry from a mixing matrix is reviewed. The technique has been applied to deduce leptonic symmetry from the tri-bimaximal neutrino mixing matrix and three of its variations. The question of how the quark mixing can be accommodated within the leptonic symmetry group is discussed, including in this connection an example based on the group $D_4$.Comment: Luxor09 talk, 7 page

institutional innovation from the bottom up?

A sustainable economy fulfills societal needs in a fundamentally different way to the current economic system. Improvements to the efficiency of existing technologies or practices appear insufficient for achieving sustainable development within the planetary boundaries. Disruptive, systemic and transformational changes appear necessary in order to replace existing technologies and practices to establish a sustainable economy. Such innovations often start out in niches; however, the scaling up and the ultimate replacement of current socio-technical systems requires governance to allow for the coordination of actors, the reorganization of socio-technical systems and the mobilization and allocation of resources. As governmental institutions are part of the current (non-sustainable) systems and thereby fail to provide coherent, integrated and transformative governance, we explore whether institutional innovation from non-state actors can step in to provide governance of transformation processes. Based on explorative qualitative case studies of networks in the food sector, city planning and reporting tools, we analyze the potential of bottom-up institutional innovations to coordinate actors in transformation processes

Generalised bottom-up holography and walking technicolour

In extradimensional holographic approaches the flavour symmetry is gauged in the bulk, that is, treated as a local symmetry. Imposing such a local symmetry admits fewer terms coupling the (axial) vectors and (pseudo)scalars than if a global symmetry is imposed. The latter is the case in standard low-energy effective Lagrangians. Here we incorporate these additional, a priori only globally invariant terms into a holographic treatment by means of a Stueckelberg completion and alternatively by means of a Legendre transformation. This work was motivated by our investigations concerning dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking by walking technicolour and we apply our findings to these theories.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure