The growing size, heterogeneity and complexity of databases demand the creation of strategies to facilitate users and systems to consume data. Ideally, query mechanisms should be schema-agnostic, i.e. they should be able to match user queries in their own vocabulary and syntax to the data, abstracting data consumers from the representation of the data. This work provides an informationtheoretic...

How to get a suitable theoretical framework for making comparisons between changes in the structures of local government and governance? Since political actors love to talk about “modernising” local government and political scientist talk about local government reforms as attempts of “modernisation”, one way of approaching the question could be to ask what “modernisation” means. Political actor...

In this paper we present a short survey of fuzzy and Semantic approaches to Knowledge Extraction. The goal of such approaches is to define flexible Knowledge Extraction Systems able to deal with the inherent vagueness and uncertainty of the Extraction process. It has long been recognised that interactivity improves the effectiveness of Knowledge Extraction systems. Novice users’ queries are the...

Despite the conceptual vagueness of definitions, both Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 are opening up for ever-growing communities of users new forms of online interaction and customization of information. In this article we explore some of the critical features of Web 2.0 and 3.0 developments applied to different conflict domains, and then present some of the basic components of the Ontomedia platform. The...

In communication, vagueness, unspecificity, approximation, uncertainty and hesitation (VUAUH) can all be expressed by words, prosody or gesture. This paper examines the relationship between the expression of VUAUH and gestures connected to them. A corpus consisting of political debates was used to select relevant data. The data enabled us to connect some of the VUAUH types, or combinations of t...

Time modeling is a crucial feature in many application domains. However, temporal information often is not crisp, but is uncertain, subjective and vague. This is particularly true when representing historical information, as historical accounts are inherently imprecise. Similarly, we conjecture that in the Semantic Web representing uncertain temporal information will be a common requirement. He...

Epistemicism is one of the main approaches to phenomenon vagueness. But how does it fare in its treatment moral vagueness? This paper has two goals. First, I shall explain why various recent arguments against an epistemicist approach vagueness are unsuccessful. Second, how, my view, reflection on Sorites can inform normative ethics powerful and interesting ways. In this connection, be putting w...