Description and Explanation

Ecological Explanation between Manipulation and Mechanism Description

Reasoning and Explanation in EL and in Expressive Description Logics

Description Logics (DLs) are the formalism underlying the standard web ontology language OWL 2. DLs have formal semantics which are the basis for powerful reasoning services. In this paper, we introduce the basic notions of DLs and the techniques that realize subsumption—the fundamental reasoning service of DL systems. We discuss two reasoning methods for this service: the tableau method for ex...

What is the Problem of Universals? From Explanation to Description

In this article I will examine a metaontological problem, which has lately been thematized for example in [19]: what is the problem of universals? I will argue for a different solution from the one that has recently been popular, a solution that represents a return to an older view. What is the problem to which the postulation of universals or alternatively of tropes (or of both in barocque ont...

Description versus explanation in cross-national research on adolescence.

The last couple of decades have seen a burgeoning of comparative studies of the behavior, health, and development of adolescents living in societies, cultures, or settings outside the United States. These studies have often been carried out by local researchers with collaborators from the U.S., or they sometimes represent the local application, in distant lands, of theories and models and measu...

Explanation in the DL-LiteFamily of Description Logics

In ontology-based data access (OBDA), access to (multiple) incomplete data sources is mediated by a conceptual layer constituted by an ontology. In such a setting, to correctly compute answers to queries, it is necessary to perform complex reasoning over the constraints expressed by the ontology. We consider the case of ontologies expressed in DL-Lite, a family of DLs that, in the context of OB...