This article is a knowledge technology case study of DNAOS, a distributed platform for Knowledge Resource Entitlement, Modeling, Management, and Sharing (KREMMS). Some historical aspects of its design, development, and release are briefly discussed, after which the DNAOS technology is commented upon from the specific viewpoint of KREMMS. At the core of this platform is the conception of knowledge as a natural phenomenon, which conception is reflected in the ontology of this technology: Fundamental knowledge structures and structuring principles, believed to (...) be “natural,” including qualification, resources, and relationships, are considered theoretically and modeled computationally. Finally, with the help of images, the reader is briefly introduced to some DNAOS capabilities, touching on transaction, application, data, model, and interface. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of the constitution relation have been explicated in terms of synchronic relations between higher‐ and lower‐level entities. Such accounts, I argue, are temporally austere or impoverished, and are consequently unable to make sense of the diachronic and dynamic character of constitution in dynamical systems generally and dynamically extended cognitive processes in particular. In this paper, my target domain is extended cognition based on insights from nonlinear dynamics. Contrariwise to the mainstream literature in both analytical metaphysics and extended cognition, (...) I develop a nonstandard, alternative conception of constitution, which I call “diachronic process constitution”. It will be argued that only a diachronic and dynamical conception of constitution is consistent with the nature of constitution in distributed cognitive processes. (shrink)

Ontological realism is a philosophical stance that provides a definitional framework for ontologies and is referred to by various applied ontologists. From a computer science perspective, ontologies are often associated with formal languages for the representation of ontologies like the Web Ontology Language (OWL). It has, however, not been made explicit how the realist framework is related to the representation formalism. We analyse how the representational units of OWL can be used for modelling realist ontologies. While OWL is sufficiently close (...) to the realist framework of ontologies to describe them, there are categories in OWL that are alien to realist ontologies or duplicate categories in realist ontologies. This clarification allows separating talk about ontologies in general from talk about their specific representation. (shrink)

The relations between ontology and information are many and fundamental, and they help us to understand the present gulf between (formal) ontology and (philosophical) Ontology: We can speak of respectively ontology-driven information and information-driven ontology as the focus on being informed vs. informed being. The question of whether these two (can) coincide is relevant to both fields, and in this article I elaborate on what needs to be addressed first of all to provide us with an answer: The form. This (...) core ontological concept rooting in Aristotelian metaphysics was central to philosophical ontology, in particular in Latin Scholasticism, when it was clearly put into relation with information as that which defines an entity. In this context, Dietrich of Freiberg synthesized this long debate in a way that matters not only to the philosophical effort of producing information-driven ontologies but also to the engineering constructs of ontology-driven information systems. (shrink)

Table of Formal and Descriptivists Ontologists (PDF - from Bernard Bolzano to present time) Ontologists of the 19th and 20th Centuries (a selection of critical judgments about some of the greatest philosophers of the recent past) Living Ontologists (a list of authors with an interest in ontology, with synthetic bibliographies).

Whether there exist causal relations between guns firing and people dying, between pedals pressed and cars accelerating, or between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming, is typically taken to be a mind-independent, objective, matter of fact. However, recent contributions to the literature on causation, in particular theories of contrastive causation and causal modelling, have undermined this central causal platitude by relativising causal facts to models or to interests. This thesis flies against the prevailing wind by arguing that we must pay (...) greater attention to which elements of our causal talk vary with context and which elements track genuine features of the world around us. I will argue that once these elements are teased apart we will be in a position to better understand some of the most persistent problems in the philosophy of causation: pre-emption cases, absence causation, failures of transitivity and overdetermination. The result is a naturalist account of causation, concordant with the contextual variability we find in our ordinary causal talk, and parsimonious with respect to the theoretical entities posited. (shrink)

This article has been retracted by the Publications Committee of the School of Philosophy and Universitas Philosophica editorial team.