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Large numbers of available scientific papers makes the research of ontology construction an attractive application area. However, there are two shortcomings for most current ontology construction approaches. First, implicit time properties of domain concepts are rarely taken into account in current approaches. Second, current automatic concept relation extraction methods mainly rely on the local context information that surrounds current considered concepts. These two problems prevent most current ontology construction methods from being employed to their full potential. To tackle these problems, we propose a hybrid learning method to integrate concepts’ global information and human experts’ knowledge together into ontology construction, among which concepts’ temporal attributes are taken into account. Our method first divides each concept into four time periods according to their attribution distribution on a time axis. Then global time-related attributions are collected for each concept. Finally, concept relations are extracted with a hybrid learning method. We evaluated our method by testing it on Chinese academic papers. It outperformed a baseline system based on only hierarchical concept relations, showing the effectiveness of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper starts with the observation that at least for the last century there has been an orthodoxy in the social sciences characterized by sui generis structures of various kinds but also (paradoxically) by the unique role of individuals in their ability to intervene in the flow of events. This paper argues that there is a commonality to a number of challenges to orthodoxy that dates back to the beginnings of the social sciences themselves with Vico. Although many connections have been made between elements of these critiques (Latour's connection to Whitehead, Deleuze's connection to Tarde), this paper proposes to make such connections more explicit by focusing on a central commitment to or tendency towards a monism characterized by a univocal ontology. The implication is that these various alternatives perhaps have more in common than normally thought and can continue to learn from each other. Most importantly, they present a coherent and viable alternative to social science orthodoxy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this paper is to provide a critical overview of the key contributions made by Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre in Qu'est-ce que l'actualité politique? Événements et opinions aux XXIe siècle. Whereas Enrichment: A Critique of Commodities is essentially a study in economic sociology, Boltanski and Esquerre's latest book reflects a shift in emphasis towards political sociology. As demonstrated in this paper, their inquiry into the ontologie de l'actualité – that is, the ontology of contemporary reality – contains valuable insights into the relationship between the production, circulation, and consumption of news, on the one hand, and the emergence of processes of politicization, on the other. The first half of this paper comprises a summary of the central arguments developed in Boltanski and Esquerre's investigation, before moving, in the second half, to an assessment of its most significant limitations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within IR, scholars are starting to consider difference on the level of ontology rather than epistemology. Other worlds are introduced into IR's political pluriverse, however, these are often encountered in faraway places, thereby playing into the colonial narrative that ontological difference does not exist in the 'West'. This paper introduces another real from within the 'disenchanted North' that is shaped by contemplative activists: people using contemplation as a form of protest. An engagement with contemplative activism challenges our commonly held assumptions about what contemplation and social change are, thereby undermining the institutions of 'science' and 'religion' underlying the universe. It argues that the project of political ontology in IR should consist of two moves: drawing in other, in particular spiritual, realities into the political imaginations of IR and challenging the ontological assumptions underpinning concepts. Consequently, it suggests that the pluriverse in IR should be a methodological rather than an ontological commitment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This issue of Transcultural Psychiatry presents selected papers from the McGill Advanced Study Institute on "Cultural Poetics of Illness and Healing." The meeting addressed the cognitive science of language, metaphor, and poiesis from embodied and enactivist perspectives; how cultural affordances, background knowledge, discourse, and practices enable and constrain poiesis; the cognitive and social poetics of symptom and illness experience; and the politics and practice of poetics in healing ritual, psychotherapy, and recovery. This introductory essay outlines an approach to illness experience and its transformation in healing practices that emphasizes embodied processes of metaphor as well as the social processes of self-construal and positioning through material and discursive engagements with the cultural affordances that constitute our local worlds. The approach has implications for theory building, training, and clinical practice in psychiatry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges François Jullien's reading of Chinese thought based on his disjunction between ontology and shi, or propensity. According to Jullien, the Chinese history of ideas has been a never-changing entity in a homogeneous society for thousands of years. Jullien's juxtaposing and contrasting 'European thought' and 'Chinese thought' falls into the trap of cultural essentialism he wanted to avoid. Jullien's interpretation of shi also led him to believe that Chinese people never challenge reality, never confront or resist, tend to stay in conformity, and lack interest in critical thinking. This paper argues that, despite the combination of Confucianism, Daoism and Legalism that constituted a powerful paradigm of normative governmentality of the hierarchical system in different dynasties in Chinese history, the spirit of political resistance has never ceased. Zhang Taiyan, at the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of Republican China, demonstrated the tradition of such critical political thinkers. The re-reading of Zhang Taiyan's Buddhist-inspired reading of Zhuangzi could offer us an additional possibility for the emancipatory and political thinking that can be inspirational even today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we chart the context in which contemporary legal debates around traditional healing in Senegal unfold, pointing in particular to the type of power–knowledge relations that are at stake in both the current legal status–quo, and legal changes proposed in 2017. We interrogate the struggles over legitimacy and recognition that are at play in these processes, and the ways in which different actors relate to both formal legal rules, and more fluid forms of legalities, in which imaginaries of the law, and negotiations with the law, translate into everyday practices. We underline how legal and scientific discourses are mobilised to draw the opportunities and boundaries offered to different healing agents, and to organise their respective authority. Traditional healers overlap with modern health practices, while retaining their own ontologies and claims to legitimacy while representatives of the biomedical professions insist that they should have some oversight over the regulation of all healers. As negotiations continue over the possibility for the state to regulate traditional healing, everyday legal choreographies define the relative roles, possibilities and precarity of different healing agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is based on the archives of Michel Foucault collected (since 2013) at the Manuscripts Department of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Our investigation focuses in particular on a complete manuscript, until now totally unknown and entitled ' Phénoménologie et psychologie ' ('Phenomenology and Psychology'). This manuscript could be the first project for a thesis devoted to 'The Notion of the "World" in Phenomenology', written around 1953–4, at the same time as a manuscript on Binswanger and existential psychiatry and as a manuscript on philosophical anthropology. We aim to show the importance that phenomenology seems to have held for Foucault at the beginning of the 1950s and in particular the role that it could have played in Foucault's distancing himself from a naturalist psychology and a philosophy of consciousness to which he opposes a philosophy of the world, of being and of language. Foucault thus discovers a truth of the phenomenology which rests on the radicality of the transcendental gesture and on the access to an ontology gathering the being, the meaning and the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a historical ethnography of how Brazil's post-dictatorial psychiatric reforms have shaped young people's lives, this paper builds on Eve Sedgwick's analysis of the hermeneutics of suspicion to show that narrow applications of Foucault's biopower concept nurture forms of resistance to bio-reductionism centred primarily on epistemic deconstruction. To unsettle this hermeneutic, I put young people's theories of power into conversation with Georges Canguilhem's concept of the milieu and with feminist scholars' work on prefigurative politics. I introduce the concepts of threading and unthreading to consider how one subject of biopower, the child-like biobehavioural figure, was continuously being threaded within a specific milieu and in relation to another key figure: the elite angst-ridden 'storm-and-stress' adolescent. Young people's subsequent unthreading and reweaving politics, flourishing in co-construction with what I call the politicizing clinic, illustrate how decolonial pedagogies can incrementally change the patterning of social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current epoch is often described by cultural theorists as facing an ontological turn with regard to the question of nature. In the Anthropocene, 'Mother Nature' makes space for 'Gaia', a nature that is inseparably related to culture. In turn, Gaia has vehemently been criticized as a harmonious figure of whole-ism. Utilizing a psychoanalytic framework, this paper traces the shift from Nature to Gaia through Jacques Lacan's 'formulas of sexuation'. From a Lacanian standpoint, sexual difference paves the way towards two different ways of relating nature and culture. Addressing the case of ruination, the author engages with the two underlying ontologies taking place in debates on nature: the narrative of Mother Nature based on a 'masculine' ontology, and the notion of Gaia as following a 'feminine' ontology. The paper concludes by outlining a feminine reading of the Anthropocene that captures nature and culture as ruined and immanently out of joint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rather than focus on effects, the isolatable and measureable outcomes of events and interventions, the papers assembled here offer different perspectives on the affective dimension of the meaning and politics of human/non-human relations. The authors begin by drawing attention to the constructed discontinuity between humans and non-humans, and to the kinds of knowledge and socialities that this discontinuity sustains, including those underpinned by nature-culture, subject-object, body-mind, individual-society polarities. The articles presented track human/non-human relations through different domains, including: humans/non-humans in history and animal welfare science (Fudge and Buller); the relationship between the way we live, the effects on our natural environment and contested knowledges about ‘nature’ (Whatmore); choreographies of everyday life and everyday science practices with non-human animals such as horses, meerkats, mice, and wolves (Latimer, Candea, Davies, Despret). Each paper also goes on to offer different perspectives on the human/non-human not just as division, or even as an asymmetrical relation, but as relations that are mutually affective, however invisible and inexpressible in the domain of science. Thus the collection contributes to new epistemologies/ontologies that undercut the usual ordering of relations and their dichotomies, particularly in that dominant domain of contemporary culture that we call science. Indeed, in their impetus to capture ‘affect’, the collection goes beyond the usual turn towards a more inclusive ontology, and contributes to the radical shift in the epistemology and philosophy of science’s terms of engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we argue that the concept of democratic quality consists of two necessary, but independently insufficient, components. The first is an opportunity-structure component, which includes the institutional and structural opportunities that allow for democratic rule. The second is a citizen component, which refers to the ways in which citizens can and do breathe life into existing institutional opportunities for democratic rule. Based on work from political theory we show how different ontologies or models of democracy place different demands on citizens as much as they do on institutions. We demonstrate the need for quality-of-democracy research to engage with work in political behavior and political psychology, from which it has traditionally been disconnected. In doing so, we provide a parsimonious analytic framework for a theory-driven selection of indicators related to three key citizen dispositions: namely, democratic commitments, political capacities, and political participation. The paper ends with a brief discussion of important implications of our argument for the future study of democratic quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the internal components (semantics) of financial electronic records. The authors adopt a view of records as representations of perceptions about a specific domain that belong to classes of representations at the centre of which are archetypal ‘good’ records (records that most faithfully represent their domains). The paper proposes a static modelling language that illustrates how the ontological concepts of Bunge and Searle can be integrated to achieve a richer grammatical explanatory tool for use in modelling the internal structure of archetypal records in the context of domains of financial crisis and contagion such as the failure of Lehman Brothers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the relationship between mobility and embodied experiences of quiescence. Rather than conceptualizing quiescence as an experience that is opposite to activity, this paper explores how various experiences of quiescence emerge through the course of a railway journey. The first section of the paper illustrates how particular dispositions of vulnerability have the potential to generate a series of desirable quiescent experiences such as daydreaming and relaxation. The second section explores how these vulnerable dispositions also have the potential to generate a series of less-comfortable quiescent experiences such as lethargy, tiredness and agitation. In doing so, this paper emphasizes the necessity to take seriously how the experience of travel itself impacts on and conditions the affective capacities of the travelling body for feeling in particular ways. In contrast to work within cultural geography that has focused on the conscious, reflective and signifying practices of the body, this paper illuminates how the multiplicity of quotidian quiescent experiences induces a different set of experiential relationships between a more vulnerable body and the timespace of the railway journey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Design of large-scale engineering systems such as an automobile, satellite, or airplane is a process to satisfy requirements by making various decisions. Design axioms provide system designers with a theoretical background to make right decisions. However, the axiomatic systems design is still hard to be implemented in the real word due to its informal representation for both the human and machine, and few researches focus on formalizing concepts of this process. In order to define axiomatic systems design models to be both user-understandable and machine-readable, this paper combines axiomatic design process with the Semantic Web technology and proposes an axiomatic design semantic representation model, called axiomatic design ontology, which organizes customers’ requirements, functional requirements, design parameters, and design solutions. The class of concepts elements and their semantic relationships are defined by the Web Ontology Language (OWL2). Rules for identifying functional couplings (the Independence Axiom) and selecting the optimal design solution (the Information Axiom) are formally represented and encoded with the Semantic Web Rule Language, which enhances the reasoning capability of the axiomatic design ontology. A framework for capturing systems design semantic information based on the axiomatic design ontology, and aligning it with domain-specific ontologies according to the semantic mapping approach has been developed, by which elaborated design information is captured and shared. Finally, a case study of systems design of a satellite solar wing subsystem is given to demonstrate the proposed axiomatic design ontology-based systems design approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers whether and how 'vitalism' might be considered relevant as a concept today; whether its relevance should be expressed in terms of disciplinary demarcations between the life sciences and the natural sciences; and whether there is a fundamental incompatibility between a 'vitalism of process' and a 'vitalism as pathos '. I argue that the relevance of vitalism as an epistemological and ontological problem concerning the categorical distinction between living and non-living beings must be contextualized historically, and referred exclusively to the epistemic horizon defined by classical physics. In contrast to this, drawing on the philosophies of Canguilhem, Whitehead, and Atlan, I propose an appreciation of the contemporary relevance of vitalism premised on the pathic and indeterminate character of nature as a whole. From this perspective vitalism expresses a politically significant ethos concerning the relationship between life, knowledge, problems and their solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages my struggles to craft geo-graphs or earth writings that also further broaden political goals of decolonizing the discipline of geography. To this end, I address a body of literature roughly termed ‘posthumanism’ because it offers powerful tools to identify and critique dualist constructions of nature and culture that work to uphold Eurocentric knowledge and the colonial present. However, I am discomforted by the ways in which geographical engagements with posthumanism tend to reproduce colonial ways of knowing and being by enacting universalizing claims and, consequently, further subordinating other ontologies. Building from this discomfort, I elaborate a critique of geographical-posthumanist engagements. Taking direction from Indigenous and decolonial theorizing, the paper identifies two Eurocentric performances common in posthumanist geographies and analyzes their implications. I then conclude with some thoughts about steps to decolonize geo-graphs. To this end, I take up learnings offered by the Zapatistas. My goal is to foster geographical engagements open to conversing with and walking alongside other epistemic worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I met Castoriadis only twice, once in Paris in 1979, and then repeatedly in Melbourne in 1991 over the time of the Thesis Eleven Conference on Reason and Imagination. Both these encounters, in different ways, were transformative for me. As it happens, I remember them very well. As the distance risks clouding memory, I take time in this paper to reconstruct and share these stories. They take us back to the world through which we first encountered Castoriadis, as Paul Cardan, via the efforts of London Solidarity and its emblematic hedgehog – small and prickly, doesn't like being interfered with; known to pop up in ways that might just be revolutionary. This was Castoriadis as I first encountered him, and this was the culture I likely never got past: Socialisme ou Barbarie, en anglais. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1972 a leap second has been introduced into global time standardization systems, due to the discrepancy between Coordinated Universal Time and International Atomic Time. Until recently, the leap second has been a consensual, if mildly uncanny adjustment, a para-governmental temporal wobble. Google's explanation of its actions with regard to the insertion of a leap second smeared into its Network Time Protocol servers is couched in terms of a period extending initially over 20 h, ultimately reaching 24 h. Google is intent on taking ownership of the smear and transducing it into a technologically stabilised change. Although there are a number of different strategies of smearing time, Google advocates for its standard smear that it wants other digital giants like Bloomberg, Amazon and Microsoft to replicate. In this paper we first analyze Google's temporal strategy in terms of its affinities and departures from the classical view of time in Aristotle's core considerations in the Physics Book IV, in terms of a consonant enumeration but in our example at variable speeds/intervals, and then in terms of Wolfgang Ernst's conception of time-critical media. Leap seconds conform to Ernst's sense of kairotic time, an auspicious micro-moment that is both techno-mathematically pre-defined and decisive for ensuring operationality. Google executes smeared time-critical processes but wants to establish mastery over the measurement and manipulation of humanly imperceptible microtemporal events by inhabiting temporal ontology itself, proposing its practice, based on misleading its servers, as a model for other digital hegemons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This interview with Charles Taylor explores a central concern throughout his work, namely, his concern to 'reenchant' self and world through a careful examination of value as emanating from the world rather than from ourselves. It focuses especially on the status of his central doctrine of 'strong evaluation' against the background of mainstream meta-ethical theories, such as neo-Kantian constructivism and robust realist non-naturalism. Additionally, the relationship between Taylor's theism and his moral–political philosophy is discussed. A key issue that is examined is what ontological background picture can make sense of the strong evaluative experience of higher worth. Some other related issues that are explored revolve around Taylor's papers 'Disenchantment-Reenchantment' and 'Recovering the Sacred', which tentatively explore the meaning of reenchantment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science and technology studies (STS) and critical cartography are both asking questions about the ontological fixity of maps and other scientific objects. This paper examines how a group of NASA computer scientists who call themselves The Mapmakers conceptualizes and creates maps in service of different commitments. The maps under construction are those of alien Mars, produced through partnerships that NASA has established with Google and Microsoft. With the goal of bringing an experience of Mars to as many people as possible, these maps influence how we imagine our neighbouring planet. This paper analyzes two attributes of the map, evident in both its representation and the attending cartographic practices: a sense of Mars as dynamic and a desire for a democratic experience of Mars in which up-to-date Mars data can be intuitively accessed not only by scientists but by lay users as well. Whereas a democratic Mars promises users the ability to decide how to interact with the map and understand Mars, dynamic Mars imposes a more singular sense of Mars as a target of continued robotic and maybe even human exploration. Because maps of Mars have a different (and arguably less complex) set of social and political commitments than those of Earth, they help us see how different goals contradict and complement each other in matters of exploration and state-craft relevant both to other worlds and our own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The argument of this paper is that social ties beyond the boardroom matter. At the structural level, social ties from non-profit foundations, cultural organizations, university boards, policy planning organizations, and private social clubs add unique ties to those established by interlocking directorates. In addition, the multiple configurations of these social affiliations increase the centrality and reduce the social distance among the corporate directors. Although visualizations of these social networks underscore the changing roles these extra-corporate ties play in uniting corporate directors, they cannot precisely capture the unique effects of ties created by social affiliations outside the boardroom. Utilizing the concepts of structural redundancy and multiplicity, the paper describes the unique contribution each set of ties makes in constructing the social mosaic of corporate America during the second half of the 20th century. The results indicate a dramatic reduction in the role private clubs play in supplementing corporate ties, and an equally significant rise in the importance of social ties generated by policy planning organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competence is a standardized way to define the profile of an enterprise. Understanding and auditing competences acquired, required, and desired by a company and further representing them in a structured manner is a beneficial step for enhancing the company’s performance. Ontology is emerging as an effective tool to structure competences for comprehensive and transportable machine understanding. In the present paper, ECOS (Enterprise Competence Organization Schema) is presented as a mechanism to capture enterprise competence in a manner understandable by computers. The objective behind this concept is to create a web of machine-readable pages describing basic information and competences of enterprises with sets of interconnected data and semantic models. The ECOS ontology captures enterprise competences using a consistent and comprehensive list of concepts and vocabulary and converts them into a semantic web resource using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). The novel concept of an ECOS-card and ECOS-form is proposed and used for developing and publishing enterprise competences. Examples from real-life enterprise applications of ECOS are also shown in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the ontological politics and possibilities of the mobile microbe. It seeks to foreground a link that exists between current understandings of the mobile microbe and the conditions of possibility structuring the production of such a microbe in the medical microbiological sciences. When the microbial world is brought into the field of medical perception, it is a monadic microbe, isolated and alone, that appears. But why is this? Because out there, in the microbial world, things travel alone? Working through a case study of the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak, this paper suggests not. That SARS was caused by one viral agent, a coronavirus (CoV), is now microbiological fact. But the argument here is that this fact is an effect; that various medical microbiological practices and interventions, whilst establishing the visibility of this monadic human coronavirus, were serving, at the same time, to suppress any possibility of a very different, and differently mobile, human coronavirus becoming similarly visible. And that is where the politics comes in. For if politics, the realm of the political, can be taken to arise in situations where various possibilities exist but not all possibilities can be chosen, then it follows that there is a politics bound up with the practical production of the mobile microbe in the medical microbiological sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing literature on modelling provides two main ways of viewing model migration: a modular view, which seeks to decompose models in their constitutive elements, and thus provides a view on what it is that migrates; and a practice-based view, which focuses on modelling as an activity, and understands a model as intricately entangled with its context of use. This article brings together these two sensitivities by focusing on ontologies of modelling. The paper presents a case study of the appropriation of modern finance theory's 'no-arbitrage' models by British actuaries – a process that gradually unfolded at around the turn of the century and led to significant friction within the UK's insurance industry. We can distinguish two main modelling ontologies: a 'risk-neutral ontology', which underpins no-arbitrage models and holds that the value of financial instruments is determined by 'arbitrage'; and, a 'real-world ontology', which assumes that the economic world consists of real probabilities that may be approximated through a combination of archival-statistical methods and expert judgment. The appropriation of the risk-neutral modelling ontology was made possible by the declining legitimacy of actuarial expertise as 'financial stewards' of life insurance companies. The risk-neutral modelling ontology provided an 'objective' alternative to the traditional actuarial models, which explicitly required actuaries to make 'prudent' judgments. Despite the fact that the no-arbitrage modelling was considered an 'objective' affair, the valuation models that insurers use today are strongly shaped by political compromises, a result of the 'rough edges' of models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A consistent theme of the literature on the ontology of the 1997 South Korean crisis is the key role played by regulatory failures and the growing weakness of the state. This paper seeks to briefly highlight both the insights and the limitations of this approach to understanding the crisis. Having done so, we shall set out the argument that the crisis created an opportunity for reformist Korean élites to advance their longstanding, but previously frustrated, project to create a comprehensive unambiguously neo-liberal regulatory regime. This paper will also seek to highlight the implications of our reading of the development of the Korean political economy for broader debates on economic liberalisation, crisis and the future of the developmental state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing complexity of systems entails an increasing complexity of simulation models. Likewise, heterogeneity in system components corresponds to heterogeneous simulation models. Cyber physical systems (CPS) represent an emerging class of technical systems characterized by their complexity and heterogeneity. Developing simulation models for CPS brings various challenges, one of which is determining the simulation fidelity. Fidelity evaluation can be introduced as the degree to which a simulation model matches the characteristics of the system it represents. Due to the growth of system complexity in CPS, the number of test cases required to reach admissible coverage to assure adequate simulation fidelity is very high. Along with that, heterogeneity in system components comes on top as another challenge. Therefore, adaptability, flexibility and automation can be identified as the key characteristics of a fidelity evaluation approach that determines its success. Model-based testing (MBT) advocates the use of models for the specification of test cases and proposes workflows for automatic test case generation. This paper presents an MBT approach for objective fidelity evaluation of complex, modular simulation models. The methodology implies that appropriate data for fidelity evaluation are available. Each test model is represented according to the formal structure of experimental frame (EF). For generating an executable EF for a model under test (MUT), configurable basic models are provided by a model base (MB). In the same manner, configurable basic models for composing various MUTs are stored in the MB. The system entity structure (SES) ontology is used for the specification of a family of MUT and test model designs on an abstract level. This means that the SES describes a set of various MUT and test model structures and parameter settings. Using the SES and MB, a specific executable model consisting of an MUT and a test model can be generated. Based on these ideas an infrastructure implementation for automated fidelity evaluation of complex, modular simulation models within MATLAB/Simulink is proposed in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic payment system that operates as an independent currency. This paper is a philosophical investigation of the ontological constitution of Bitcoin. Using Slavoj Žižek’s ontological triad of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, the paper distinguishes between three ideal typical theories of money: commodity theory, fiat theory, and credit theory. The constitution of Bitcoin is analysed by comparing the currency to each of these ideal types. It is argued that Bitcoin is commodity money without gold, fiat money without a state, and credit money without debt. In conclusion, it is suggested that Bitcoin poses an ideological challenge to conventional forms of money in so far as it not only provokes sedimented beliefs about money but also exposes the forms of exploitation, risk and even violence inherent in the existing system of state authorized credit money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a framework that detects potential ontology building errors to improve the ontology quality. These potential errors are called ontology pitfalls in the literature. This work extends the existing ontology pitfall set in the literature and suggests new solutions for ontology repair. We have also developed a Java implementation for detection of the proposed pitfalls. These pitfalls were evaluated with well-known ontologies using this implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, a comprehensive debate has been taking place over the ontological, epistemological and methodological roots underlying the discipline of International Political Economy. A fundamental and sometimes fierce discussion arose over the questions of which research strategies should prevail, which methods should be applied and what kind of knowledge counts as scientific. The debate has tended to reduce the different positions and International Political Economy approaches to American International Political Economy on the one side and British International Political Economy on the other. Framing the perspectives in this way, however, is misleading. This article argues that the issue at the core of the methodological debate is not the American versus the British school, but rather theoretical monism versus theoretical pluralism. Hence, the core of the debate addresses the question whether scientific work in International Political Economy should ultimately subscribe to one methodology or one fundamental principle or whether the field should make use of a wide variety of theories and methods so as to enable scholars to adapt their research strategy depending on the case under study. A short analysis of existing approaches to the global financial crisis shows the importance of the existence of multiple perspectives, concepts and theoretical approaches. The paper concludes that the 2008 financial crisis in particular has shown how dangerous it is to reduce intellectual endeavour to a narrow mindset. Only pluralism conveys the ability to respond in an adequate manner to the old and new challenges of our times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aims of XML data conversion to ontologies are the indexing, integration and enrichment of existing ontologies with knowledge acquired from these sources. The contribution of this paper consists in providing a classification of the approaches used for the conversion of XML documents into OWL ontologies. This classification underlines the usage profile of each conversion method, providing a clear description of the advantages and drawbacks belonging to each method. Hence, this paper focuses on two main processes, which are ontology enrichment and ontology population using XML data. Ontology enrichment is related to the schema of the ontology (TBox), and ontology population is related to an individual (Abox). In addition, the ontologies described in these methods are based on formal languages of the Semantic Web such as OWL (Ontology Web Language) or RDF (Resource Description Framework). These languages are formal because the semantics are formally defined and take advantage of the Description Logics. In contrast, XML data sources are without formal semantics. The XML language is used to store, export and share data between processes able to process the specific data structure. However, even if the semantics is not explicitly expressed, data structure contains the universe of discourse by using a qualified vocabulary regarding a consensual agreement. In order to formalize this semantics, the OWL language provides rich logical constraints. Therefore, these logical constraints are evolved in the transformation of XML documents into OWL documents, allowing the enrichment and the population of the target ontology. To design such a transformation, the current research field establishes connections between OWL constructs (classes, predicates, simple or complex data types, etc.) and XML constructs (elements, attributes, element lists, etc.). Two different approaches for the transformation process are exposed. The instance approaches are based on XML documents without any schema associated. The validation approaches are based on the XML schema and document validated by the associated schema. The second approaches benefit from the schema definition to provide automated transformations with logic constraints. Both approaches are discussed in the text. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the late 1960s there has been a resurgence of interest in Spinozism in France: Gilles Deleuze was among the first who gave life to a ‘new Spinoza’ with his seminal book Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (1968). While Deleuze was primarily interested in Spinoza’s ontology and ethics, the contemporary French philosopher Étienne Balibar focuses on the political writings. Despite their common fascination for Spinoza’s relational definition of the individual, both thinkers have drawn very different consequences from the Spinozist inspiration regarding the relevance of his philosophy for a contemporary ethical and political thought. Deleuze draws from Spinoza an ethics of the encounter, an ‘ethology’ that is concerned with the composition of bodies on a plane of immanence. Balibar, on the contrary, deals with the modes of communication that we institute between one another and that are always effectuations on two levels at once: the real and the imaginary. Whereas Deleuze emphasizes the conception of a univocal plane of immanence, Balibar insists on a double expression of the real and the imaginary in any transindividual practice. The aim of this paper is to compare and finally assess their respective contributions to a conception of collective political action: the question of constitution of the ‘free multitude’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a shared conceptual model that can express knowledge and a modelling tool that can describe conceptual model in the semantic and knowledge level, ontology plays an important role in the related fields of the Semantic Web, natural language processing and information retrieval. Ontology learning is a series of methods and technologies to construct ontology automatically or semi-automatically. Concept and hierarchy learning are the most important parts of the ontology construction. This paper proposes an ontology concept and hierarchy learning method based on the Pachinko Allocation Model. The above problem is transformed into a probability and statistical inference problem by building an ontology concept learning model. Gibbs sampling is used to estimate the parameters. Then, using the ontology concept generation algorithm based on WordNet, an abstract description of the ontology concept is obtained. Experimental results on the standard test dataset show that the proposed method can offer an effective solution to ontology concept and hierarchy learning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This is a paper about child-welfare regulations, policies, and practices as they impact Indigenous families and communities. I take as my starting point that child welfare, and geographies of Indigenous homes and families, are under-scrutinized ontologies worthy of more investigation especially by geographers interested in understanding neo settler-colonial power – and how to unsettle it. I track historical logics of state intervention into Indigenous families through to the present day, reviewing the empirics of child removals and state interventions into contemporary Indigenous families in British Columbia, Canada. Curtailing the state’s ongoing disruption of Aboriginal families and communities, I conclude, requires understanding child welfare ontologically, as historically contiguous with other colonial projects, and as premised in great part on ungrounded logics of ‘common sense’ that (re)produce Indigenous families and communities as rarified and othered geographies in constant need of intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ontological politics of an encounter between proposed energy pipelines and Indigenous peoples. The Enbridge Corporation has applied to construct a pipeline system to deliver diluted bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to the Pacific coast of British Columbia, but the Carrier Sekani Tribal Council and their member communities have asserted the authority to prevent this project from passing through their unceded territories. Studying Carrier Sekani contestation of Canadian regulatory assessment of the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, we examine how the processes of Indigenous becoming exceed notions of Indigenous being that are included in the permitting process as traditional knowledge. We focus both on the performance of legal obligations to consider Aboriginal traditional knowledge and the emerging politics of Carrier Sekani resistance. Our intention is not to question the integrity of traditional knowledge that the regulatory process incorporates, but to highlight how traditional knowledge functions as an anchor for a field of governmental inquiry and action. Providing a historical and geographical context of Carrier Sekani relations with development and the state, we argue that the coding of Indigenous being as traditional works to disavow contemporary processes of Indigenous becoming that are surplus to the spatial ontology of capitalist energy development for global markets. Against efforts to sanction development on disputed territory through formal recognition of a constrained Indigeneity, Carrier Sekani people assert the sovereign authority to prevent or permit development on their lands and waterways using traditional governance systems. Broadly, this paper suggests that recognizing the ontological politics at stake in this permitting process provides a useful opening to understand continued colonial captures at work in the inclusion of traditional knowledge in environmental governance. But it also demonstrates the capacity of Indigenous resistance to these enclosures to challenge and reshape global geographies of energy, capitalism, and climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coherent interpretations of many claims about measurement in the psychological sciences depend on philosophically realist commitments regarding the psychological attributes purportedly being measured. However, what it means to be a realist regarding psychological attributes has not been clarified, and this may contribute to the reluctance of psychometricians and others to embrace realist positions. This paper attempts to clarify what a psychological attribute might believably be. Drawing on conceptual resources provided by Searle's (1992) biological naturalism, as well as other perspectives from the philosophies of mind and language, it is argued that psychological attributes can, in principle, be said to exist. On the realist perspective, the existence of an attribute is a necessary but insufficient condition for its measurability. However, existence is not the same as immutability or independence from human intentionality, and the role that humans play in creating psychological attributes cannot be ignored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects upon questions of ontological contingency when the stark, visceral reality of a person’s relentless self-destruction unfolds within institutional mechanisms that systematically withhold certain kinds of care. I consider these issues through the lens of “manipulation” as it is elaborated within an American eating disorders treatment center, where the notion of manipulation does particular kinds of affective and pragmatic work. Specifically, it serves to render clients as, paradoxically, both hyper-agentic and “agentically challenged” in ways that legitimate the withholding of their recognition as full subjects and therefore deserving of care. I propose that the ontological perspectives of the treatment center are ill-equipped for accounting for such dynamics and, in fact, carry certain risks when employed in the consideration of psychiatric conditions where they can even become coopted in unintended ways. This carries special importance when working with people whose ontological status is, in a very real (and not just theoretical) sense, teetering on the brink of the void. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a poststructuralist analytic strategy that highlights the political nature of interview analysis. Interviews pose a particular challenge for poststructuralist researchers given a widespread view that they are a method for accessing the ‘truth’. We develop a strategy that bypasses this difficulty by analysing precisely ‘what is said’ in interviews. In our analysis, discourse refers to knowledge, not language. With this understanding, we argue that focusing on exactly ‘what is said’ provides an entry point into the knowledges that make it possible for something to be said and into the eruption of new possibilities. This focus displaces assumptions about an ‘interior’ self who constructs versions of the world, with a concern for the strategic relations – the politics – within which objects and subject positions are produced. The paper draws on interviews conducted during a study into women cycling to demonstrate our poststructuralist analytic strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of digital disconnection – the voluntary non-use of digital media – is a growing research domain characterized by increasingly pluralistic approaches. To map this diverse terrain, we offer an analytical heuristic: a continuum of approaches to digital disconnection. This tool proposes one primary dimension – viewing digital disconnection as individually functional to socially meaningful (ontology) – and two secondary, concomitant dimensions – holding post-positive to interpretivist perspectives on knowledge generation (epistemology) as well as applying quantitative to qualitative methods (methodology). We offer examples of scholarship along the continuum and advocate for the complementarity of different approaches. Although the continuum is not a universal framework, it provides a tool for scholars to review the domain and for digital disconnection researchers specifically to locate themselves on and build bridges across the continuum. We hope that this continuum supports and expands the pluralistic nature of digital disconnection scholarship into the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of ‘the relationship between the individual and society’ has troubled group analysis since its inception. This paper offers a reading of Foulkes that highlights the emergent, yet evanescent, psychosocial ontology in his writings, and argues for the development of a truly psychosocial group analysis, which moves beyond the individual/society dualism. It argues for a shift towards a language of relationality, and proposes new theoretical resources for such a move from relational sociology, relational psychoanalysis and the ‘matrixial thinking’ of Bracha Ettinger which would broaden and deepen group analytic understandings of relationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores empirical ontology by arguing that realities are enacted in practices. Using the case of Atlantic salmon, it describes a series of scientific and fish-farming practices. Since these practices differ, the paper also argues that different salmon are being enacted within those different practices. The paper explores the precarious choreographies of those practices, considers the ways in which they enact agency and also work to generate Otherness. Finally it emphasises the productivity of practices and notes that they generate not simply particular realities (for instance particular salmon), but also enact a penumbra of not quite realised realities: animals that were almost but not quite created. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Hybrid geographies, ‘naturecultures’, and post-environmental arguments commonly caution against material essentialism, and typically eschew primordial grounds as foundations for ethics. Attenuating such claims, the following paper argues that, nevertheless, ethical grounds are functions of pre-human material givens. Further, the paper explores how we are temporally bound through these more-than-human processes and agencies. Decay is highlighted as one such ontological process that necessarily privileges itself as a matter of human and ethical concern. To argue this position, two island imaginaries are juxtaposed. By contrasting their materialities of plastic and humus, the paper proposes attending to a processual ground immanent to ethical concern. Desert islands, primordial materials of the immemorial (humus), are contrasted to a built island space proposed to be made from pelagic waste (plastic). The contrast reveals that some ontological processes are always already privileged by materialities temporally subtending specifically human spatio-temporal horizons. The argument invites contemporary hybrid geographies to attend to how spatial materialities are also agentially wrought by temporal processes that shape the emergent objects and trajectories of our thought. It concludes with the claim that an ethical basis lies in attuning to human immanence within more-than-human geo-capacities. Good to think with, islands can be performative materials for this ethical attunement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The philosophical perspectives on model evaluation can be broadly classified into reductionist/logical positivist and relativist/holistic. In this paper, we outline some of our past efforts in, and challenges faced during, evaluating models of social systems with cognitively detailed agents. Owing to richness in the model, we argue that the holistic approach and consequent continuous improvement are essential to evaluating complex social system models such as these. A social system built primarily of cognitively detailed agents can provide multiple levels of correspondence, both at observable and abstract aggregated levels. Such a system can also pose several challenges, including large feature spaces, issues in information elicitation with database, experts and news feeds, counterfactuals, fragmented theoretical base, and limited funding for validation. We subscribe to the view that no model can faithfully represent reality, but detailed, descriptive models are useful in learning about the system and bringing about a qualitative jump in understanding of the system it attempts to model – provided they are properly validated. Our own approach to model evaluation is to consider the entire life cycle and assess the validity under two broad dimensions of (1) internally focused validity/quality achieved through structural, methodological, and ontological evaluations; and (2) external validity consisting of micro validity, macro validity, and qualitative, causal and narrative validity. In this paper, we also elaborate on selected validation techniques that we have employed in the past. We recommend a triangulation of multiple validation techniques, including methodological soundness, qualitative validation techniques, such as face validation by experts and narrative validation, and formal validation tests, including correspondence testing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Ontology matching, aimed at finding semantically related entities from different ontologies, plays an important role in establishing interoperation among Semantic Web applications. Recently, many similarity measures have been proposed to explore the lexical, structural or semantic features of ontologies. However, a key problem is how to integrate various similarities automatically. In this paper, we define a novel metric termed a “differentor” to assess the probability that a similarity measure can find the one-to-one mappings between two ontologies at the entity level, and use it to integrate different similarity measures. The proposed approach can assign weights automatically to each pair of entities from different ontologies without any prior knowledge, and the aggregation task is accomplished based on these weights. The proposed approach has been tested on OAEI2010 benchmarks for evaluation. The experimental results show that the differentor can reflect the performance of individual similarity measures, and a differentor-based aggregation strategy outperforms other existing aggregation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The work of Henri Bergson has been influential on recent conceptualizations of the relationship between past, present, and future, particularly in studies of social remembering that argue that the past is a transformative process on the present. This paper will draw on some of the similarities in the temporal ontologies of Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, and utilize the latter’s work on theorizing the organization of the present in anticipation of the future. This will be used to analyse a case study of a community mental health service user, for whom the future exists as hopeful potential for a better life. The concepts of actual occasion and nexus are recruited to highlight the organized formation of the service user’s home, which enables the anticipatory perception of future life. The paper concludes by arguing for an approach to the study of mental distress that takes seriously the active role of the future on the present, and how such a process is organized as a relational phenomenon in domestic home environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Epidemics such as HIV/AIDS and H5N1 provide compelling arguments for restricting meetings and minglings between humans and viruses. Geographers have begun to address these spaces of bio(in)security, highlighting how epidemics actively reconfigure social and spatial relations as humans seek to respond to viral threats. This approach offers an important route for geographers to intervene in contemporary biopolitical debate, but such analyses are also defined through the epidemic spaces they study. In contrast, this paper explores the more endemic spaces of human-virus relations and focuses on ontological politics: the materialities of human and viral bodies, the socio-material worlds they inhabit and the ways in which they respond to each other’s presence and agency. Taking inspiration from more-than-human and animal geographies, and the work of Donna Haraway, this paper examines the UK’s Common Cold Research Unit (CCU) where humans and viruses were encouraged to meet and mingle so scientists could study the common cold. Two key arguments are made. First, that focusing on how scientists sought to accommodate viruses at the CCU draws attention to the risks and benefits for both humans and viruses of reconfiguring relations between them. Second, echoing recent moves in health geography towards embodied understandings of health and disease, a case for recognizing how human-virus relations are cultured through embodied communication. I conclude that rather than seeing viruses as an external threat to be eradicated, we might recognize how we have learned and are learning to live endemically with our viral companions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Working in the long historical shadow of what has been taken to be debates between quantitative and qualitative methods, Osatuke and Stiles (2011), Westerman (2011), and Yanchar (2011) seek to move beyond those debates and even the various détentes posed in mixed-methods research. Their projects can be assessed in terms of this seemingly permanent shadow and also within a broader framing of the political, ethical, epistemic, and ontological stakes that abide in methodological decisions. Taking a broad historical and meta-theoretical perspective illuminates both the boldness and the limitations of the three papers. Especially notable are their procedures for abandoning the Archimedean distanced observational stance, replacing it with intersubjective, relational processes of knowledge seeking. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the advent of Network-Centric Warfare (NCW) concepts, Command and Control (C2) systems need efficient methods to produce, exchange, and consume diverse kinds of information within the networks. The System Entity Structure (SES) is an ontology framework that can facilitate information exchange in a network environment. From the perspective of the SES information exchange framework, the Battle Management Language (BML) serves to specify the information desired by a consumer in an unambiguous way. This paper formulates information exchange in the SES ontology via BML and defines novel pruning and transformation processes of the SES to extract and fuse data into higher-level representations. This supports increased interoperability between human users and other sensor systems. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed information exchange framework for data fusion systems, we illustrate the approach in an air defense operation scenario using Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS) modeling and simulation. The demonstration shows that the information requested by a commander is delivered in the right way at the right time so that it can support agile decision making against threats. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper addresses the exclusion of physical and technical media from questions of ontology. It is argued, first, that from Aristotle onwards ontology has dealt with the matter and form of things rather than the relations between things in time and space. Second, it is argued that because the Greeks did not distinguish between speech elements and alphabetic letters there has been a tendency for philosophy to neglect writing as its own technical medium. This paper traces these tendencies through a range of philosophical sources: from Aquinas and Descartes to Fichte and Hegel. It is argued, by way of response, that it is only with Heidegger that a philosophical consciousness for technical media first arose, and that today the connections of mathematics and media, and of media and ontology are to be formulated in more precise terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an ontology-based multi-layered knowledge framework for a product lifecycle management. Participants in a product life cycle want to share comprehensive product knowledge without ambiguity or heterogeneity. However, previous knowledge management approaches are limited in providing these aspects. Our knowledge framework has a systematic lattice structure with three product knowledge types and four layers. The three knowledge types are axioms, knowledge maps, and specialized knowledge for a domain. The four layers consist of a product context model, a product specific model, a product planning model, and a product manufacturing model. These layers represent different abstraction levels of the product knowledge conceptualization. Each layer includes the aforementioned three knowledge types in order to accommodate comprehensive knowledge and is represented with first order logic for a uniform representation. We provide formal definitions of the framework to manage comprehensive knowledge according to the proposed knowledge framework. In addition, we develop a prototype system for realization of the framework. The system will help knowledge engineers create, edit, and visualize product knowledge according to the framework and infer new knowledge with a prolog inference engine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]