This chapter focuses on attempts to introduce a market to stimulate competition and generate creativity in the field of malaria vaccines. The chapter draws on a qualitative research project engaging 34 organisations in the malaria field. It is argued that those involved in attempts to produce a malaria vaccine market continually work to manage a tension between apparent ontological singularity ...

Following the advent of the Internet technology and the rapid growth of its applications, users have spent long periods of time browsing through the ocean of information found in the Internet. This time-consuming hunt, however, makes searching, retrieving, displaying, integrating and maintaining data such arduous tasks. One way to solve this problem is to study the concept behind the Semantic W...

In the present paper we make some contributions to the theory of upper level ontologies. Every domain-speci c ontology must use as a framework some upper-level ontology which describes the most general, domain-independent categories of reality. It turns out that the top-level ontology of the well-known standard modelling languages KIF (Knowledge Interchange Format), F-logic (Frame-Logic), and C...

Ontological analyses have been used in numerous publications to compare existing modelling grammars with an ontology. However, a sound theoretical research framework is still missing. Consequently, working with the results of such ontological analyses is theoretically questionable. The aim of the paper is threefold. Firstly, we want to contribute to such a theoretical research framework by form...

In this paper we consider the emerging position in metaphysics that artifact functions characterize real kinds of artifacts. We analyze how it can circumvent an objection by David Wiggins (Sameness and substance renewed, 2001, 87) and then argue that this position, in comparison to expert judgments, amounts to an interesting fine-grained metaphysics: taking artifact functions as (part of the) e...

There are several texts pertaining to Perisian painting which explain its aesthetics on the basis of mysticism and the notion of imaginal world. This point of view bears some methodological problems. Some of the prominent scholars (Corbin, Burckhardt, Nasr, Ringgenberg et al.) refering to Ibn ‘Arabi’s mystical notions, have tried to show that the specific aesthetics o...

OBJECTIVE The National Cancer Institute Thesaurus is described by its authors as "a biomedical vocabulary that provides consistent, unambiguous codes and definitions for concepts used in cancer research" and which "exhibits ontology-like properties in its construction and use". We performed a qualitative analysis of the Thesaurus in order to assess its conformity with principles of good practic...

Concept models, or ‘ontologies’ represented in description logics are becoming central to many efforts in re-usable medical terminologies. Developers of any ontology must make a series of choices concerning how concepts are represented. These choices are made more difficult by the limitations of the logical formalisms in which ontologies are represented and the complexity of the pragmatics of m...