This introduction to the Second International Conference on Formal Ontology and Information Systems presents a brief history of ontology as a discipline spanning the boundaries of philosophy and information science. We sketch some of the reasons for the ...

In this paper, I will present a method for constructing correlated series of granularity-dependent distance and diameter measures on the basis of a theory of qualitative spatial concepts. Each granularity-dependent measure function has as its range a ...

There are some who defend a view of vagueness according to which there are intrinsically vague objects or attributes in reality. Here, in contrast, we defend a view of vagueness as a semantic property of names and predicates. All entities are crisp, on ...

Interoperability and integration of data sources are becoming ever more important issues as both, the amount of data and the number of data producers are growing. Interoperability not only has to resolve the differences in data structures, it also has to ...

Though the utility of domain Ontologies is now widely acknowledged in an increasing number of domains, several barriers must be overcome before Ontologies become practical and useful tools. A critical issue is the task of identifying, defining, and ...

Process modeling is ubiquitous in business and industry. While a great deal of effort has been devoted to the formal and philosophical investigation of processes, surprisingly little research connects this work to real world process modeling. The purpose of ...

In this paper we focus on a specific aspect of the notion of conceptualisation, i.e. on the issue of the specification of a certain kind of concept: sortal concept. Our starting point is the intuitive idea that a sortal concept cannot be specified in ...

Taxonomies are commonly used for organizing knowledge, particularly in biomedicine where the taxonomy of living organisms and the classification of diseases are central to the domain. The principles used to produce taxonomies are either intrinsic (...

We here deal with mereotopological properties of parts and associated wholes, locations and empty spaces (holes), with particular reference to biological structures. Our considerations lead to a basic ontology which contains 'solid object', 'hole' and '...

There is now a growing literature on qualitative spatial representations covering many aspects of spatial representation including mereology, topology, orientation and distance. In this paper I will briefly outline some of these approaches to qualitative ...

It is no secret that the multidisciplinary sphere of information systems has borrowed the term 'ontology' from philosophy, and reinterpreted it to be more suitable for information systems. However, there is some disagreement about what this reinterpretation ...

The human conceptual system contains knowledge about the world that supports categorical inference, conceptual combination, and basic cognitive tasks (e.g., perception, memory, language, thought). Standard views of semantic memory typically portray the ...

While it is crucial to understand the formal structure of the semantic domain of an information system, in this paper we raise an ontological issue about the syntactic aspect of a representation system through a case study on a diagrammatic system. The ...

We discuss the treatment of prevention statements in both natural language semantics and knowledge representation, with particular regard to existence entailments. First order representations with an explicit existence predicate are shown to not adequately ...

Ontological semantics is a theory of meaning in natural language and an approach to natural language processing (NLP) which uses an ontology as the central resource for extracting and representing meaning of natural language texts, reasoning about ...

Representation theorems for systems of regions have been of interest for some time, and various contexts have been used for this purpose: Mormann [17] has demonstrated the fruitfulness of the methods of continuous lattices to obtain a topological ...

An ontology can be seen as an approximation to what exists in the real world. An ontological model is the kernel used for specifying ontologies so that how close an ontology can be from the real world depends on the possibilities offered by the ontological ...

In this paper we discuss the nature of our overall enterprise to create ontologies in the product and service knowledge space for Business-to-Business (B2B) electronic commerce. We describe one crucial problem: the mapping problem, i.e., mapping among ...

I present a logical language for describing spatial, temporal and material properties of the physical world. The formalism is ontologically well-founded in the sense that it is interpreted with respect to model structures that have a specific physical ...

Axiomatic systems and composition tables are often seen as alternative ways of specifying the semantic interrelations of relations for qualitative reasoning. Axiomatic characterizations usually specify ontological assumptions concerning the domain of the ...