Kurt Gödel’s ontological argument for God’s existence has been formalized and automated on a computer with higher-order automated theorem provers. From Gödel’s premises, the computer proved: necessarily, there exists God. On the other hand, the theorem provers have also confirmed prominent criticism on Gödel’s ontological argument, and they found some new results about it. The background theory...

The thesis of methodological individualism in social science is commonly divided into two different claims – explanatory individualism and ontological individualism. Ontological individualism is the thesis that facts about individuals exhaustively determine social facts. Initially taken to be a claim about the identity of groups with sets of individuals or their properties, ontological individu...

Various explicit and implicit naming conventions for entities have emerged in ontological engineering realms during the decade/s of its existence. In the paper we argue that the naming principles are neither trivial nor completely haphazard in practice, present a preliminary categorisation of ontology naming patterns, and discuss the impact of entity naming on both human and computer perception...

An explicit formal-ontological representation of entities existing at multiple levels of granularity is an urgent requirement for biomedical information processing. We discuss some fundamental principles which can form a basis for such a representation. We also comment on some of the implicit treatments of granularity in currently available ontologies and terminologies (GO, FMA, SNOMED CT).

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in approaches that employ foundational ontologies as theoretical tools for analyzing and improving conceptual modeling languages. However, some of these approaches do not always make explicit their ontological commitments. This leads to situations where criticisms resulting from the specific ontological choices made by a particular approach are...

Ontological pluralism is the view that there are different ways of being. Historically, being aligned with ontological categories. This paper about to investigate why such a connection, and how it should be understood. suffers from an objection, according which collapses into monism, i.e., only one way be. Admitting categories can save this objection if ground

This paper describes the design principles of methodology of knowledge-oriented information systems based on ontological approach. Such systems implement technology subject-oriented extraction of knowledge from the set of natural language texts and their formal and logical presentation and application processing

This paper presents a formalized ontological framework for the analysis of classifications of geographic objects. We present a set of logical principles that guide geographic classifications and then demonstrate their application on a practical example of the classification of ecosystems of Southeast Alaska. The framework has a potential to be used to facilitate interoperability between geograp...

Reductionism is the idea that all of the complex and apparently disparate things we observe in the world can be explained in terms of universal principles governing their common ultimate constituents: that physics is the theory of everything. Antireductionism comes in two varieties: epistemological and ontological. Epistemological antireductionism holds that, given our finite mental capacities,...

Research in ontology has in recent years become widespread in the field of information systems, in various areas of sciences, in business, in economy, and in industry. The importance of ontologies is increasingly recognized in fields diverse as in e-commerce, semantic web, enterprise, information integration, information science, qualitative modeling of physical systems, natural language proces...