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Specimen identification keys are still the most commonly created tools used by systematic biologists to access biodiversity information. Creating identification keys requires analyzing and synthesizing large amounts of information from specimens and their descriptions and is a very labor-intensive and time-consuming activity. Automating the generation of identification keys from text descriptions becomes a highly attractive text mining application in the biodiversity domain. Fine-grained semantic annotation of morphological descriptions of organisms is a necessary first step in generating keys from text. Machine-readable ontologies are needed in this process because most biological characters are only implied (i.e., not stated) in descriptions. The immediate question to ask is “How well do existing ontologies support semantic annotation and automated key generation?” With the intention to either select an existing ontology or develop a unified ontology based on existing ones, this paper evaluates the coverage, semantic consistency, and inter-ontology agreement of a biodiversity character ontology and three plant glossaries that may be turned into ontologies. The coverage and semantic consistency of the ontology/glossaries are checked against the authoritative domain literature, namely, Flora of North America and Flora of China. The evaluation results suggest that more work is needed to improve the coverage and interoperability of the ontology/glossaries. More concepts need to be added to the ontology/glossaries and careful work is needed to improve the semantic consistency. The method used in this paper to evaluate the ontology/glossaries can be used to propose new candidate concepts from the domain literature and suggest appropriate definitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops the idea of the 'building biography' in order to examine the ontology of large city hotels as they undergo redevelopment. The paper draws on archival research on one of Sydney's most famed hotels, The Australia, exploring how it was periodically repositioned by management and shareholders within the changing time-spaces of Sydney's urban economy between its opening in 1891 and its demolition in 1971. We highlight the importance of American hotel management principles, standards and techniques, and internal debates surrounding maintenance and refurbishment. We consider the importance of 'demolition narratives' and their links to the collective memory of guests, Sydney residents and hotel workers, and stress the importance of local property markets in the construction of the hotel as an anachronism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Portuguese-speakers, when asked about their personal names, often respond with a notion of the ‘truth of’ their names. Basing itself on ethnographic data collected by the author in Macao (southern China), Bahia (Brazil), and Portugal, the article interprets this notion of truth as a form of ontological weighing that postulates the unitariness of the person by reference to a subjection to a bureaucratic order and to a cultural and linguistic universe associated to it. Résumé Interrogés sur leur nom personnel, les lusophones incluent souvent dans leur réponse une notion de « vérité » de ce nom. Sur la base de données ethnographiques recueillies par l’auteur à Macao (Sud de la Chine), à Bahia (Brésil) et au Portugal, le présent article interprète cette notion de vérité comme une forme d’évaluation ontologique qui présuppose l’unité de la personne par sa sujétion à un ordre bureaucratique et à l’univers culturel et linguistique associéà celui-ci. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]