Continuants PDF Download

Author: David Wiggins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191026034
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 256

View

Book Description
This volume gathers twelve essays by David Wiggins in an area where his work has been particularly influential. Among the subjects treated are: persistence of a substance through change, the notion of a continuant, the logic of identity, the co-occupation of space by a continuant and its matter, the relation of person to human organism, the metaphysical idea of a person, the status of artefacts, the relation of the three-dimensional and four-dimensional conceptions of reality, and the nomological underpinning of sortal classification. From a much larger body of work the author has selected, edited or annotated, and variously shortened or extended eleven pieces. He has added an Introduction and one completely new essay, on the philosophy of biology and the role there of the idea of process. The collection begins with an essay postdating his Sameness and Substance Renewed (2001), which amends and upstages his earlier presentation of his sortalist conception of identity. In subsequent essays and the introduction Wiggins examines the contributions to these subjects made by Heraclitus, Aristotle, Leibniz, Roderick Chisholm, Hilary Putnam, Sydney Shoemaker, Michael Ayers, Saul Kripke, W. V. Quine, David Lewis, Fei Xu, and others.

Author: Peter N. Robinson
Publisher: CRC Press
ISBN: 1439836663
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 517

View

Book Description
Introduction to Bio-Ontologies explores the computational background of ontologies. Emphasizing computational and algorithmic issues surrounding bio-ontologies, this self-contained text helps readers understand ontological algorithms and their applications. The first part of the book defines ontology and bio-ontologies. It also explains the importance of mathematical logic for understanding concepts of inference in bio-ontologies, discusses the probability and statistics topics necessary for understanding ontology algorithms, and describes ontology languages, including OBO (the preeminent language for bio-ontologies), RDF, RDFS, and OWL. The second part covers significant bio-ontologies and their applications. The book presents the Gene Ontology; upper-level ontologies, such as the Basic Formal Ontology and the Relation Ontology; and current bio-ontologies, including several anatomy ontologies, Chemical Entities of Biological Interest, Sequence Ontology, Mammalian Phenotype Ontology, and Human Phenotype Ontology. The third part of the text introduces the major graph-based algorithms for bio-ontologies. The authors discuss how these algorithms are used in overrepresentation analysis, model-based procedures, semantic similarity analysis, and Bayesian networks for molecular biology and biomedical applications. With a focus on computational reasoning topics, the final part describes the ontology languages of the Semantic Web and their applications for inference. It covers the formal semantics of RDF and RDFS, OWL inference rules, a key inference algorithm, the SPARQL query language, and the state of the art for querying OWL ontologies. Web Resource Software and data designed to complement material in the text are available on the book’s website: http://bio-ontologies-book.org The site provides the R Robo package developed for the book, along with a compressed archive of data and ontology files used in some of the exercises. It also offers teaching/presentation slides and links to other relevant websites. This book provides readers with the foundation to use ontologies as a starting point for new bioinformatics research projects or to support current molecular genetics research projects. By supplying a self-contained introduction to OBO ontologies and the Semantic Web, it bridges the gap between both fields and helps readers see what each can contribute to the analysis and understanding of biomedical data.

Author: B. Bennett
Publisher: IOS Press
ISBN: 1607502119
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 388

View

Book Description
Researchers in areas such as artificial intelligence, formal and computational linguistics, biomedical informatics, conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering and information retrieval have come to realise that a solid foundation for their research calls for serious work in ontology, understood as a general theory of the types of entities and relations that make up their respective domains of inquiry. In all these areas, attention is now being focused on the content of information rather than on just the formats and languages used to represent information. The clearest example of this development is provided by the many initiatives growing up around the project of the Semantic Web. And, as the need for integrating research in these different fields arises, so does the realisation that strong principles for building well-founded ontologies might provide significant advantages over ad hoc, case-based solutions. The tools of formal ontology address precisely these needs, but a real effort is required in order to apply such philosophical tools to the domain of information systems. Reciprocally, research in the information sciences raises specific ontological questions which call for further philosophical investigations. The purpose of FOIS is to provide a forum for genuine interdisciplinary exchange in the spirit of a unified effort towards solving the problems of ontology, with an eye to both theoretical issues and concrete applications. This book contains a wide range of areas, all of which are important to the development of formal ontologies.

Author:
Publisher: IOS Press
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 3525

View

Book Description

Author: Raúl Monroy
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3540214593
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 941

View

Book Description
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2004, held in Mexico City, Mexico in April 2004. The 94 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 254 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on applications, intelligent interfaces and speech processing, knowledge representation, logic and constraint programming, machine learning and data mining, multiagent systems and distributed AI, natural language processing, uncertainty reasoning, vision, evolutionary computation, modeling and intelligent control, neural networks, and robotics.

Author: Stewart Umphrey
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498531423
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 187

View

Book Description
In Natural Kinds and Genesis: The Classification of Material Entities, Stewart Umphrey raises and answers two questions: What is it to be a natural kind? And are there in fact any natural kinds? First, using the everyday understanding of things, he argues that natural kinds may be understood as classes or as types, and that the members or tokens of such kinds are individual continuants. A continuant is essentially a being-in-becoming, a material thing which changes and yet remains the same, in virtue of its nature or essence, as long as it exists. In the primary sense of the term, then, a natural kind is a class whose members closely resemble one another substantially, in virtue of their essences. Alternatively, it is a type whose tokens exemplify it in virtue of their essences. To answer the second question, one must make use of relevant scientific theories as well. Umphrey agrees with scientific essentialists that there are natural kinds, but he argues that most of the chemical, physical, and biological kinds posited in current theories are not natural kinds in the primary sense of the term. The natural-kinds realism he affirms is thus quite restricted: it requires the existence of enduring things which closely resemble one another in virtue of their essences, and such things exist, apparently, only if they have come into being, or emerged, in the course of symmetry-breaking events. Natural Kinds and Genesis will be of interest to philosophers of science and to those interested in the metaphysics of natural kinds and their members.

Author: Sami Khuri
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3642150209
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 236

View

Book Description
Biomedical engineering and medical informatics are challenging and rapidly growing areas. Applications of information technology in these areas are of paramount imp- tance. The aim of the first ITBAM conference was to bring together scientists, - searchers and practitioners from different disciplines (mathematics, bioinformatics, biology, medicine, biomedical engineering and computer science) having such c- mon interests. We hope that ITBAM conferences will provide opportunities for fru- ful discussions between all attendees and provide a platform where participants can exchange their most recent results, identify future directions and challenges, initiate possible collaborative research and system development, and develop common l- guages for solving problems in the realm of biomedical engineering, bioinformatics and medical informatics. The importance of computer-aided diagnosis and therapy has drawn more and more attention worldwide and laid the foundation for modern medicine with excellent potential for promising applications such as telemedicine, Web-based healthcare and analysis of genetic information. For this conference, after a peer-review process, we finally selected 13 long papers and 8 short papers that are now published in this volume. They are divided in to the following groups: workflow management and database; decision support and data management in biomedicine; medical data modelling and information retrieval; data mining in bioinformatics; knowledge representation and data management in bio- formatics; biological data and signal processing. The papers show how broad the spectrum of topics in applications of information technology to biomedical engine- ing and medical informatics is.

Author: Ludwig Jaskolla
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319659278
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 257

View

Book Description
This book explores persistence, taking human beings as an example case. It investigates how concrete particulars stay the same during their temporal carriers while changing significantly. Themes of relativity, structural realism, 4-dimensional ontologies and different strains of panpsychism are amongst those addressed in this work. Beginning with an exploration of the puzzle of persistence, early chapters look at philosophers’ perspectives and models of persistence. Competitors in the debate are introduced, from classical 3-dimensionalism to two flavors of 4-dimensionalism, namely worm theory and stage theory. The second part of the book explores the various challenges to 4-dimensionalism and develops a positive taxonomy of those questions that the reasonable proponent of 4-dimensionlism needs to answer. In the third part of the book readers may explore an ontology at the interface of analytic metaphysics and philosophy of mind, called Real Fourdimensionalism, or more specifically: Physicalistic Stage-Panexperientialism (PSP). This is a version of panexperiential stage theory and its alleged model of persistence-as-deciding answers the questions of the taxonomy. This book makes a substantial contribution to debates concerning the status, extent and viability of both stage theoretic models of persistence as well as non-reductive, naturalistic models of persistence. It will be of interest to graduates and scholars involved in analytic metaphysics, as well as the philosophy of mind, especially those specializing in questions of persistence and the ontology of the mind.

Author: Robert Arp
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026232959X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 245

View

Book Description
An introduction to the field of applied ontology with examples derived particularly from biomedicine, covering theoretical components, design practices, and practical applications. In the era of “big data,” science is increasingly information driven, and the potential for computers to store, manage, and integrate massive amounts of data has given rise to such new disciplinary fields as biomedical informatics. Applied ontology offers a strategy for the organization of scientific information in computer-tractable form, drawing on concepts not only from computer and information science but also from linguistics, logic, and philosophy. This book provides an introduction to the field of applied ontology that is of particular relevance to biomedicine, covering theoretical components of ontologies, best practices for ontology design, and examples of biomedical ontologies in use. After defining an ontology as a representation of the types of entities in a given domain, the book distinguishes between different kinds of ontologies and taxonomies, and shows how applied ontology draws on more traditional ideas from metaphysics. It presents the core features of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), now used by over one hundred ontology projects around the world, and offers examples of domain ontologies that utilize BFO. The book also describes Web Ontology Language (OWL), a common framework for Semantic Web technologies. Throughout, the book provides concrete recommendations for the design and construction of domain ontologies.

Author: F. Neuhaus
Publisher: IOS Press
ISBN: 1643682490
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 192

View

Book Description
Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS) is the flagship conference of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications, a non-profit organization promoting interdisciplinary research and international collaboration at the intersection of philosophical ontology, linguistics, logic, cognitive science, and computer science. This book presents the 11 papers accepted for the 12th edition of FOIS. The conference was held from 13-17 September 2021 in Bozen-Bolzano, Italy, as a hybrid event with some participants attending on-site in Bolzano and others attending virtually online. The papers are divided into 3 sections and cover a wide range of topics: (1) Foundations, addressing fundamental issues; (2) Applications and Methods, presenting novel uses, systems, tools, and approaches; and (3) Domain Ontology, describing well-formed ontologies in particular subject areas.