The need to organize and publish metadata about European research results in the field of natural disasters has been met with the help of two innovative technologies: the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) and the Resource Description Framework (RDF). OGSA provides a common platform for sharing distributed metadata securely. RDF facilitates the creation and exchange of metadata. In this pape...

Andy J. Wills Abstract This chapter reviews some of the main ways in which theories of categorization have been expressed in formal, mathematical terms. The focus of the models discussed is the categorization of abstract visual forms by adults in situations where prior knowledge is unlikely to contribute much to performance. Each of the main components of categorization models is discussed: inp...

Formal models of categorization are psychological theories that try to describe the process of categorization in a lawful way, using the language of mathematics. Their mathematical formulation makes it possible for the models to generate precise, quantitative predictions. SUSTAIN (Love, Medin & Gureckis, 2004) is a powerful formal model of categorization that has been used to model a range of h...

While still influential, the view that concepts are organized as a hierarchical taxonomy as proposed by Rosch (1973) has been challenged on several occasions. For example, some studies have attributed a larger role to thematic relations (Gentner and Kurtz, 2005; Lin and Murphy, 2001), whereas others have stressed the role of affect in structuring word meaning (Niedenthal et al., 1999). A compre...

ness. Second, every attribute specified for a concept is shared by more than one instance of the concept. Thus, the information contained in a concept is an abstraction across instances of the concept. The overlapping networks of shared attributes thus formed hold conceptual categories together. In this respect, the family resemblance view is like the classical view: Both maintain that the inst...

The aim of this study is to examine the ways in which individuals’perceptions of media use are inji’uenced by others. Traditional theories of media use have proposed that perceptions of media use are shaped by individuals’ demographic characteristics and the media’s characteristics. However, three recent theories--cn’tical mass theory, social inf7uence model of media use, and adaptive structura...

Three formal models of category learning, the rational model (Anderson, 1990), the configural-cue model (Gluck & Bower, 1988a), and ALCOVE (Kruschke, 1992), were evaluated on their ability to account for differential learning of hierarchically structured categories. An experiment using a theoretically challenging category structure developed by Lassaline, Wisniewski, and Medin (1992) is reporte...

Omission bias is the preference for harm caused by omissions over equal or lesser harm caused by acts. Recent articles (Connolly & Reb, 2003; Patt & Zeckhauser, 2000; Tanner & Medin, in press) have raised questions about the generality of this phenomenon and have suggested that the opposite bias (action bias) sometimes exists. Prentice and Koehler (2003) have suggested that omission bias is som...

Medin et al (2003) proposed that relevance is crucial for property induction. Two experiments were conducted to test the effects of instructing the relevance and processing efforts. In both experiments, the relevance of causality or the diversity was manipulated by giving different instructions. Processing efforts were manipulated differently in the two experiments. In Experiment 1, processing ...

The ability to acquire non-linearly separable (NLS) classifications is well documented in the study of human category learning. In particular, one experiment (Medin & Schwanenflugel, 1981; E4) is viewed as the canonical demonstration that, when withinand betweencategory similarities are evenly matched, NLS classifications are not more difficult to acquire than linearly separable ones. The resul...