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Background: Traditionally, architecture blends knowledge, doing and context in ways that largely anticipated the situated cognition movement. Within this area, the notion of architectural type has been proposed to help organize and communicate interesting patterns across the variety of spatial entities. Types have been isolated looking at different aspects like the relationship between architectural entities and the surrounding space, the form and/or functionality of the entities, and the interactions among entities and users. This led to different understandings of what types are with arguments often driven by the architects' background perspective and their historical motivations. Aims: To collect and review notions of architectural type that have been particularly influential to highlight how they have been motivated, to show their similarities and dissimilarities, and to discuss the elements that can be taken as unifying across the different views. Method: We apply techniques of applied ontology to develop a cognitive framework for the understanding of architectural types and in particular their cognitive elements. We then use this framework to analyse the different notions in the literature. We also discuss advantages and limitations of our approach. Results: The analysis is ongoing, and we have partial results at the moment. We can show that some types are constant across time and cultures and that over time new types are introduced as merging/transformations of previous types. The comparison of the different definitions in the literature allows also to clarify how the notion has been understood in different historical periods.

Upper ontologies are sophisticated systems that require an expressive language to be properly formalized and correctly implemented. This paper provides a formal study of one of these ontologies, called YAMATO, by providing an axiomatization in first-order logic of part of the main system. YAMATO, which has been available in OWL for some years and is used in research projects as well as in applications, is quite rich in terms of categories and relations. The system is also interesting from its ontological perspective as it presents a different combination of ontological choices with respects to todays popular upper ontologies. Here we isolate a fairly compact fragment of this system that covers important categories, such as Process and Role, and relations, such as Enacting and CausallyContributing. The axiomatization is a first step towards the full exploitation of YAMATO in information and computational systems.

This paper presents an overview of the use of planning and execution techniques in nodes of a Reconfigurable Transportation Systems (RTSs). A manufacturing plant is here conceived as multiple independent modules to implement alternative inbound logistic systems' configurations. To support this capability of the robotic hardware, an integrated solution is proposed using timeline-based planning and control responsible for managing both the node regular activities and reconfiguration activities. A cooperation layer dedicated to multi-robot coordination completes the overall architecture.

Mereotopology is an approach to modeling space that allows to formalize human spatial intuition without reference to points. A predominant formal theory in this area is the Regions Connection Calculus (RCC) introduced in 1992. RCC has an original fault: it relies on the notion of (Euclidean) point for the interpretation of its primitive, i.e., the connection relation C. In this paper we show that in the natural structures for mereotopology, RCC is a theory of manifolds in disguise. It follows that RCC can be reformulated without reference to any notion of point both at the syntactic and at the semantic levels.

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.

We aim to build a theoretical framework for the management of the research animal facility at the Istituto Zooprofilattico Sperimentale delle Venezie (IZSVe). The main goal is to identify which entities are involved in the different processes, which properties they have and which roles they play. This study helps to clarify the general perspective of the IZSVe research animal facility and will set the basis for the development of an integrated data management system.

In this paper three perspectives are presented on defining the general notion of technical artifacts in formal ontologies. These perspectives share two intuitions: that technical artifacts are objects that exist by human intervention; and that technical artifacts are to be contrasted to natural entities. Yet the perspectives are different in the way they spell out these intuitions: the relevant human intervention may range from intentional selection to intentional production; and the contrast between technical artifacts and natural entities may be introduced by a constitution relation or by defining properties that set technical artifacts apart. The three perspectives are compared and their similarities and dissimilarities are explored.

The paper reviews geometrical approaches in the area of quali- tative space representation by discussing formal systems of geometry based on the notion of extended regions (mereo- geometries). The focus is on primitives that are cognitively motivated and that capture different notions of naive geometry. The paper then moves to consider the role of mereogeometries (and in particular of the concepts they rely upon) in the domain of picture morphology in two ways: it discusses some primitives that are motivated from the cognitive perspective, and it considers the issue of granularity and refinement.

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.

The definition of Artificial Intelligence that can be found on the pages of Wikipedia is the intelligence exhibited by machines or software which clearly has a rather broad and vague meaning that in many circumstances has been misunderstood. I would therefore focus more on Artificial Intelligence Tools, i.e. the spectrum of mathematical procedure that can be used to gain, explore and exploit knowledge during a design process. To gain knowledge means to probe design opportunities in a systematic way in order to collect sufficient data to be able to understand and predict product behaviour. To explore knowledge means to be able to drive automatically through the design options using optimization techniques. To exploit knowledge means to be able to take rational decisions about the configuration of a product to be produced. All these actions can be performed by means of software components based on AI-related tools: Neural networks, Evolutionary Computing, Classifier Systems just to name a few. In the development of decision support software for design optimization there is not one technique that would prevail but a blending of tools, including more traditional mathematical algorithms, that contribute to the finding of the best design configuration. In this presentation a selection of industrial application form transportation industry to consumer goods will be used to showcase the use of AItools in daily design activity while possible future needs will be identified by looking at the opportunity offered by collaborative environments.