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Information technology has embraced the ontological approach to expand its capacity to deal with knowledge of different kinds. The subsequent combination of formal concerns and philosophical considerations has led to the development of new knowledge systems that rely on foundational distinctions of entity type such as object, process, property and role. This change has attracted attention to the distinction between types of entity in the enterprise. The result is a compartmentalisation of the information, which, although well motivated and technically fruitful, is not always optimal for knowledge management (KM) tasks where one aims at an integrated view of information. This paper focuses on the notion of knowledge object understood as a formal construct for knowledge modelling and KM systems. The approach starts from formal and ontological analysis with an eye to modelling knowledge at large. The paper motivates the introduction of a notion of knowledge object as a new type of entity that emerges from the explicit interaction of material entities, information entities and roles within an enterprise. The main goals of this work are: to discuss the capacity of knowledge objects to tie knowledge and roles in an (enterprise) context; to model aspects of enterprise knowledge that escape standard ontological approaches; and to describe knowledge objects as a conceptual tool that can be integrated within existing formal systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we give formalisations of two engineering concepts of technical function and present in more general terms the project of supporting functional description translation by ontological analysis. The formalisations are given within the foundational dolce ontology and the concepts formalised are as follows: (1) the function as defined in the Functional Representation approach by Chandrasekaran and Josephson and (2) the function as defined 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 behaviour of artefacts, and the second by means of operations on flows as performed by artefacts. We analyse the similarities and differences between these concepts by means of the formalisations and show how the formalisations support the automated translation between functional descriptions based on these two concepts. In addition, we compare our strategy of formalising different engineering concepts of function within one foundational ontology with other strategies in the ontology-driven formalisation, such as defining a single formalised concept of function, either for replacing existing engineering concepts, or for use as a reference by which such existing concepts can be related. We compare these strategies and sketch the merits and shortcomings of our strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose that adequate treatments of space need to be multiperspectival and related to sound foundational ontologies. To support this, we show that natural spatial descriptions commonly appeal to diverse theories of space and these need to be formally combined to be fully interpreted. Our account draws particularly on the foundational ontology DOLCE and the algebraic specification language CASL. We show how the structuring mechanisms of CASL suggest mechanisms for both building and combining multiperspectival ontologies of space. We also suggest that these mechanisms provide a natural link both with currently emerging cognitive principles such as blending and with developments in ontology mediation and mapping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]