Traditional information search in which queries are posed against a known and rigid schema over a structured database is shifting towards a Web scenario in which exposed schemas are vague or absent and data comes from heterogeneous sources. In this framework, query answering cannot be precise and needs to be relaxed, with the goal of matching user requests with accessible data. In this paper, w...

Experts often disagree about the organization of biological taxa. The shifting definitions of taxonomic names complicate otherwise simple queries concerning these taxa. For example, a query such as “how many occurrences of specimens in genus G are recorded in database D” will return different answers depending on whose definition of genus G is used. In our proposed framework, taxonomic classifi...

Knowledge management has become a major application of information technology (IT) and a major focus of IT research. Thus, it becomes increasingly important to understand the nature of the knowledge object and knowledge engineering processes. The assumption underlying this article is that in order for knowledge to be managed by technological means, it must first be represented in the relevant t...

In this paper taxonomies are considered to be mathematical lattices. This gives us a \two-edged sword" for describing taxonomies. On the one-hand, we have a concise algebra suitable for speciication of taxonomies, and on the other an order theoretic representation suitable for visual presentation of ontologies. A language based on algebraic lattices is described and given a model-theoretic sema...