Various proposals have been made to extend object-oriented languages and database systems with roles because they allow to weaken strict typing concepts and therefore can provide mechanisms for an object to change its type during its lifetime. But this so-called object migration is not the only advantage ooered by a suitable role model. This paper studies the possibilities to use roles for a ge...

With rising importance of knowledge interchange, many industrial and academic applications have adopted ontologies as their conceptual backbone. However, industrial and academic environments are very dynamic, thus inducing changes to application requirements. To fulfill these changes, often the underlying ontology must be evolved as well. As ontologies grow in size, the complexity of change man...

Juvenile angiofibroma is a rare benign lesion originating from the pterygopalatine fossa with distinctive epidemiologic features and growth patterns. The typical patient is an adolescent male with a clinical history of recurrent epistaxis and nasal obstruction. Although the use of nonsurgical therapies is described in the literature, surgery is currently considered the ideal treatment for juven...

I present a framework to study the evolution of traits that allow an organism to survive life-threatening but rare risks. Specifically, I am concerned with risks so rare that any one individual in a population may not experience the risk-causing event in its lifetime. A theory of rare risk management is virtually absent in evolutionary biology, although it is well developed in economics. This i...

Mappings between ontologies are easily harmed by changes in the ontologies. In this paper we explain a mechanism to define modular ontologies and mappings in a way that allows for local containment of terminological reasoning. We have also developed a change detection and analysis method that predicts the effect of changes on the concept hierarchy. This method determines whether the changes in ...

In order to meet the demands of the Semantic Web, today’s ontologies need to be dynamic, networked structures. One important challenge, therefore, is to develop an integrated approach to the evolution process of ontologies and related metadata. Within this context, the specific goal of this work is to capture the evolution of metadata due to changed concepts, relations or metadata in one of the...

Synopsis. Organizations are too complex to “solve”. Consequently, corporate improvement programs are as likely to be deleterious as beneficial. Evolutionary mechanisms offer an alternative approach to organizational improvement. Organizational policies correspond to biological genes; policy innovation corresponds to genetic mutation; and learning corresponds to genetic recombination. These corr...

This research proposes an automated OWL product domain ontology (PDO) evolution (without a human inspection) based on given user feedback and enhancing an existing ontology evolution concept. Its manual activities are eliminated by formulating an adaptation strategy for the conceptual aspects of an automated PDO evolution and establishing a feedback cycle. The adaptation strategy consists of a ...