The Unified Medical Language System and the Gene Ontology are among the most widely used terminology resources in the biomedical domain. However, when we evaluate them in the light of simple principles for wellconstructed ontologies we find a number of characteristic inadequacies. Employing the theory of granular partitions, a new approach to the understanding of ontologies and of the relations...

An important issue in the newborn discipline of ontological engineering is the construction of libraries of ontologies which are designed for maximum reusability. Van Heijst et. al. suggested that a central part of ontology libraries is the definition of what they called a core ontology, containing elements that are as generic and method-independent as possible. However, their specification of ...

Visualisation has significant advantages over traditional textual lists for improving cognition in information retrieval. To realise these advantages, we identify a set of cognitive principles and usage patterns for information retrieval. We apply these principles and patterns to the design of a prototype visual information retrieval system, Bubbleworld. In Bubbleworld, we apply a variety of vi...

In the present paper I aim at introducing a formal framework to deal with persistence and change of material objects in time. I first consider three main ontological theories: perdurantism ([6], [7], [16]), endurantism ([18]) and sequentialism ([2]); then develop a formal account for these theories, by making use of semantics for quantified modal logics: Kripke semantics ([3], [10]), the substa...

The educational ontologies PIZZA and WINE&FOOD have been widely used to teach ontology methods and tools. However, the two ontologies have remained largely unchanged for many years, despite increasing awareness of foundational principles for good ontology design (GoodOD). Recognizing that the two ontologies are lagging behind such principles, we analysed and re-designed them by strictly adherin...

Major purposes underlying the functionality of formal systems include reasoning services and presentation facilities, prominently their systematic coordination. An important role in this coordination is played by the ontology and its underlying organization principles exhibited in the systems' knowledge bases. We address this issue by presenting speci c components of our proof development syste...

The Referent Tracking paradigm which advocates the use of instance unique identifiers to refer to the entities comprising the subject matter of patient health records promises many benefits to those who use health record data to improve patient care. To further the adoption of the paradigm we provide an illustration of how data from an EHR application needs to be decomposed to make it accord wi...

We discuss how the normative dimension of sustainability can be captured in terms of justice. We (i) identify the core characteristics of the concept of sustainability and discuss underlying ethical, ontological and epistemological assumptions; (ii) introduce a general conceptual structure of justice for the analysis and comparison of different conceptions of justice; and (iii) employ this conc...

In this paper we present an architecture that augments existing semantic-based web service discovery solutions. The idea is to combine principles from the semantic and pragmatic web in order for the web service selection process to become more efficient and effective. We utilize offer and request xml files to describe the functional properties (inputs/outputs) and context parameters of web serv...

Ontologies are commonly considered as one of the essential parts of the Semantic Web vision, providing a theoretical basis and implementation framework for conceptual integration and information sharing among various domains. In this paper, we present the main principles of a new ontology acquisition framework applied for semi-automatic generation of scientific portals. Extracted ontological re...