"Psychology," like many abstract terms, is difficult to define precisely. Henriques' (this issue) argument that psychology, though unified and coherent, actually spans two realms-psychological formalism ("the science of mind," this issue) and human psychology ("the science of human behavior at the individual level," this issue)-seems likely to improve the clarity of the concept. The strongest c...

Multi-Level Modeling is receiving increasing levels of interest and its active research community is continuing to make progress. However, to advance the discipline effectively it is necessary to increase industry adoption and achieve better community cohesion. We believe that the key to addressing both these challenges is to promote the creation of more comparisons in the multi-level modeling ...

In a semantic portal, contents are described and organized based on domain ontologies. However, with the increasing amount of information generated each day on the web, dynamic publishing in these portals, whose contents are obtained from a large and diversified number of sites, still represents a major challenge, since this task lacks mechanisms to update and integrate information automaticall...

The use of ontologies enables one to organize, to make explicit and to share knowledge about a certain domain. This article describes a case study in the domain of blood transfusion, in which we have developed an ontology about human blood components. As an ongoing research, we present the partial results obtained with the proposed ontology.

We create a unified framework for analyzing and synthesizing plans with loops for solving problems with nondeterministic numeric effects and a limited form of partial observability. Three different action models—with deterministic, qualitative non-deterministic and Boolean nondeterministic semantics—are handled using a single abstract representation. We establish the conditions under which the ...

Many instructional design models have been proposed and their benefits are evident. However, there is lack of a common and formal notation to describe the product of the design. This causes difficulty in evaluating the product (the course) in the development. To eliminate the difficulty, we need a formal framework which has enough semantics for keeping the consistency of the product. Thus, this...

Once again, a scientists, critical thinkers, and engineers wa are indtroducing new notions in the transdisciplinary arena from which new generation of intellectual and physical analysis and synthesis tools and techniques will be produced.These tools and techniques will take the form in which science, engineering, and management notions would be fused into a unified transdisciplinary entities. T...

We present an ontological framework, based on preference rankings, that allows users to express their preferences between the knowledge explicitly available in the ontology. Using this formalism, the answers for a given query to an ontology can be ranked by preference, allowing users to retrieve the most preferred answers only. We provide a host of complexity results for the main computational ...

The mutual understanding, shared knowledge, or cognition between business and IT units has been discussed frequently and in wide range of fields in IS research. On the other hand, we are still lacking a consistent and comprehensive conceptualization of what shared business/IT understanding is actually about, and previous studies have usually only taken some aspects of it into account. These oft...