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Both natural objects and artifacts have been studied from a variety of perspectives by the different sciences. One issue that has so far resisted philosophical and ontological investigations is the definition of a general notion of function capable of making sense of the functions attributed to natural objects, such as biological organisms, as well as of the functions attributed to artifacts, such as (designed) tools. The paper starts from the notions of role and context to study a definition already used to define artifact functions. The clarification of types of functional contexts and of the role of intentionality in defining function leads to a new proposal that applies to functions of natural objects as well as of artifacts. Finally, we evaluate our proposal against some desiderata discussed in the literature.

In this paper we give formalizations of two engineering concepts of technical functions and present in more general terms the project of supporting engineering functional reasoning by means of ontological analyses. The concepts that we formalize are the concepts of function as defined in the Functional Representation approach by Chandrasekaran and Josephson and in the Functional Basis approach by Stone and Wood. These two concepts represent two main ways of understanding functions in engineering: the first by means of the behavior of artifacts, and the second by means of operations on flows as preformed by artifacts. Both formalizations are given within the foundational DOLCE ontology. Our choice to formalize existing concepts of functions within a single foundational ontology, is one strategy towards the goal of ontological analyses of functions. This goal of enabling the development of tools for automated functional reasoning, may be realized by other strategies as well, such as defining a single formalized concept of function, either for replacing existing concepts or for use as a reference to which existing concepts should be related. We compare these strategies briefly and discuss the merits and shortcomings of our strategy. © Organizing Committee of TMCE 2010 Symposium.

The work presented in the thesis strives from the need of providing ontological foundations for product knowledge management; in particular, it provides an ontological characterisation of engineering features on the grounds of foundational theories of ontology engineering. Inasmuch as feature-based models are employed for disparate application tasks, on the one side we develop a high-level understanding of features by distinguishing the domain entities that are modelled in their terms. In this manner, we aim at an ontology that is not strictly committed to specific application requirements but it is broadly applicable to product knowledge representation. On the other hand, we focus on the representation of (some aspects of) the physical layouts of material products. The notion of form feature plays a relevant role in this context and attention will be paid in the different ways in which it can be understood and represented according to engineering conceptualisations.