yamato sharply distinguishes itself from other existing upper ontologies in the following respects. (1) Most importantly, yamato is designed with both engineering and philosophical minds. (2) yamato is based on a sophisticated theory of roles, given that the world is full of roles. (3) yamato has a tenable theory of functions which helps to deal with artifacts effectively. (4) Information is a ‘content-bearing’ entity and it differs significantly from the entities that philosophers have traditionally discussed. Taking into account the modern (...) society in which a flood of information occurs, yamato has a sophisticated theory of informational objects (representations). (5) Quality and quantity are carefully organized for the sake of greater interoperability of real-world data. (6) The philosophical contribution of yamato includes a theory of objects, processes, and events. Those features are illustrated with several case studies. These features lead to the intensive application of yamato in some domains such as biomedicine and learning engineering. (shrink)

Roles remain nebulous entities, notwithstanding their extensive interdisciplinary research. This paper argues through a meta-ontological conceptual tool of grounding that there are three key facets of roles: a role position, a role specification, and a role potential. A foundational perspective on roles can be specified by “role choices” as to which facet of roles is primary. Role choices are illustrated with theories of roles that are built in compliance with four well-known upper ontologies: GFO, DOLCE, BFO, and UFO. The relationship (...) between such three facets of roles and the GFO-based three kinds of roles (relational, processual, and social) is closely examined. These three facets are also comparatively studied from linguistic (e.g. ‘have a role’ versus ‘play a role’) and methodological (realism versus conceptualism regarding ontology design) perspectives. Furthermore, the family resemblance view of roles as “epistemic trackers” is proposed: the general notion of role is merely (partially) unified by its three facets and helps to keep track of some entity with respect to its role-related aspects. Finally, defining characteristics of roles in conceptual modeling are considered in terms of the three-facet theory. This work provides the grist for future practical development of an ontological module for generic role representation. (shrink)

Standards and ontologies for manufacturing understand resources differently. Because of this heterogeneity, misunderstandings arise concerning the basic features that characterize them. The purpose of the paper is to investigate how to ontologically model resources with the goal of facilitating the development of knowledge representation models for manufacturing. By reviewing the literature, we discuss and compare three approaches for the representation of resources depending on whether they are conceived in connection to either processes, plans or goals. By addressing the advantages and (...) shortcomings of each view, we present a unifying perspective to enable the modeling of resources in an integrated manner. In this way, the intended meanings of the used notions are harmonized and, as a result, one can facilitate multiple experts to interact e.g., via data sharing and/or data integration procedures. Differently, by keeping three separated views, there is no guarantee that data coming from different parties will share common meanings even if the same terms are used. By the end of the paper, we present a case study to show the application of our approach and to compare it with an existing ontology for manufacturing. (shrink)

Expressions designating collectives, such as “the committee” or “the ships in the port”, may be interpreted de re or de dicto, depending on context, according as they pick out collectives defined by their members or collectives defined by some criterion for membership. We call these E-collectives and I-collectives respectively, and in this paper we explore in depth the relationship between these two categories. In particular, we identify important respects in which they differ, regarding the nature of the dependence of the (...) collective on its members, the nature of the parthood relation in which the members stand to the whole, and, from an application perspective, the different methods used for identifying the two forms of collective from large spatio-temporal data-sets. (shrink)

A thorough understanding of what needs are is fundamental for design- ing well-behaved information systems for many social applications and in partic- ular for public services. Talking about needs pervades indeed the jargon of Public Administrations when motivating their service offering. In this paper, we propose an ontological analysis of needs, aiming at a principled disentangling of the differ- ent uses of the term. We leverage philosophical tradition on intentionality, for its rich understanding of mental entities, we compare it with (...) the well-established BDI (Belief-Desire-Intention) tradition in knowledge representation, and we propose a formalisation of needs within the foundational ontology DOLCE. Throughout the paper, we motivate our analysis focusing on needs in public services. (shrink)