Integration und Desintegration sind ein zentrales Thema der Geisteswissenschaften. Auf makropolitischer Ebene gilt das besondere Interesse dem Entstehen und Vergehen von Staaten, entscheiden sich doch hiermit existenzielle Fragen des Seins einer politischen Gemeinschaft. Auf mikropolitischer Ebene geht es um die Frage, inwieweit dem Bürger "aufgegeben" ist, sich in Gesellschaft und Staat zu integrieren. Supranationalisierung und Globalisierung lassen die Kraft des Nationalstaates schwinden. Dem Übergang der Moderne in die Postmoderne entspricht der Übergang von der Welt der Staaten mit ihren durch Grenzen (...) abgeschlossenen Territorien zur Welt der Kontinente, Gemeinschaften und Netzwerke. Doch gibt es viele Stimmen, die meinen, der Staat sei auf absehbare Zeit nicht wegzudenken und als politische Gemeinschaft zu schützen.Werner Mäder ist anderer Auffassung: "Deutschland ist kein Staat mehr..." lautet sein Befund. Der Autor zieht Parallelen zu Hegels Schrift "Kritik der Verfassung Deutschlands" aus dem Jahre 1801 und seinen Kriterien des Staates. Nach Mäder ist das Grundgesetz nur noch eine "Gedankenverfassung", seine fundamentalen Voraussetzungen Staat, Souveränität, Nation, Volk und Demokratie substanziell ausgezehrt. Für Europa bedeutet dies, sich mit eigener Identität selbst zu behaupten, um den Souveränitätsverlust seiner Länder auszugleichen und auf eine neue Multipolarität der internationalen Beziehungen hinzuarbeiten. (shrink)

This collection broadens the scientific discussion of modularity by bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, including artificial life, ...

Philosophers of science traditionally have ignored the details of scientific research, and the result has often been theories that lack relevance either to science or to philosophy in general. In this volume, leading philosophers of biology discuss the limitations of this tradition and the advantages of the "naturalistic turn"—the idea that the study of science is itself a scientific enterprise and should be conducted accordingly. This innovative book presents candid, informal debates among scholars who examine the benefits and problems of (...) studying science in the same way that scientists study the natural world. Callebaut achieves the effect of face-to-face engagement through separate interviews with participants. Contributors include William Bechtel, Robert Brandon, Richard M. Burian, Donald T. Campbell, Patricia Churchland, Jon Elster, Ronald N. Giere, David L. Hull, Philip Kitcher, Karin Knorr Cetina, Bruno Latour, Richard Levins, Richard C. Lewontin, Elisabeth Lloyd, Helen Longino, Thomas Nickles, Henry C. Plotkin, Robert J. Richards, Alexander Rosenberg, Michael Ruse, Dudley Shapere, Elliott Sober, Ryan Tweney, and William Wimsatt. "Why can't we have both theoretical ecology and natural histories, lovingly done?"—Philip Kitcher "Don't underestimate the arrogance of philosophers!"—Elisabeth Lloyd. (shrink)

Moral perceptualism is the theory that perception and perceptual experience is attuned to moral features in our environment. This idea has received renewed attention in the last 15–20 years, for its potential to do theoretical work in moral epistemology and moral psychology. In this paper, I review the main motivations and arguments for moral perceptualism, the variety of theories that go under the heading of “moral perception,” and the three biggest challenges to moral perception. https://youtu.be/9cc_1zykq80.

The Information Artifact Ontology (IAO) was created to serve as a domain‐neutral resource for the representation of types of information content entities (ICEs) such as documents, data‐bases, and digital im‐ages. We identify a series of problems with the current version of the IAO and suggest solutions designed to advance our understanding of the relations between ICEs and associated cognitive representations in the minds of human subjects. This requires embedding IAO in a larger framework of ontologies, including most importantly the Mental (...) Func‐tioning Ontology (MFO). It also requires a careful treatment of the aboutness relations between ICEs and associated cognitive representa‐tions and their targets in reality, which implies in turn a new treatment of the relation of truthmaking. (shrink)

This volume has its already distant or1g1n in an inter national conference on Evolutionary Epistemology the editors organized at the University of Ghent in November 1984. This conference aimed to follow up the endeavor started at the ERISS (Epistemologically Relevant Internalist Sociology of Science) conference organized by Don Campbell and Alex Rosen berg at Cazenovia Lake, New York, in June 1981, whilst in jecting the gist of certain current continental intellectual developments into a debate whose focus, we thought, was in (...) danger of being narrowed too much, considering the still underdeveloped state of affairs in the field. Broadly speaking, evolutionary epistemology today con sists of two interrelated, yet qualitatively distinct inves tigative efforts. Both are drawing on Darwinian concepts, which may explain why many people have failed to discriminate them. One is the study of the evolution of the cognitive apparatus of living organisms, which is first and foremost the province of biologists and psychologists (H. C. Plotkin, Ed. , Learning, Development, and Culture: Essays in Evolu tionary Epistemology, New York, Wiley, 1984), although quite a few philosophers - professional or vocational - have also felt the need to express themselves on this vast subject (F. M. Wuketits, Ed. , Conce ts and Approaches in Evolutionary Epistemology, Dordrecht Boston, Reidel, 1984). The other approach deals with the evolution of science, and has been dominated hitherto by (allegedly) 'naturalized' philosophers; no book-length survey of this literature is available at present. (shrink)

Big data biology—bioinformatics, computational biology, systems biology (including ‘omics’), and synthetic biology—raises a number of issues for the philosophy of science. This article deals with several such: Is data-intensive biology a new kind of science, presumably post-reductionistic? To what extent is big data biology data-driven? Can data ‘speak for themselves?’ I discuss these issues by way of a reflection on Carl Woese’s worry that “a society that permits biology to become an engineering discipline, that allows that science to slip into (...) the role of changing the living world without trying to understand it, is a danger to itself.” And I argue that scientific perspectivism, a philosophical stance represented prominently by Giere, Van Fraassen, and Wimsatt, according to which science cannot as a matter of principle transcend our human perspective, provides the best resources currently at our disposal to tackle many of the philosophical issues implied in the modeling of complex, multilevel/multiscale phenomena. (shrink)

The goal of referent tracking is to create an ever-growing pool of data relating to the entities existing in concrete spatiotemporal reality. In the context of Electronic Healthcare Records (EHRs) the relevant concrete entities are not only particular patients but also their parts, diseases, therapies, lesions, and so forth, insofar as these are salient to diagnosis and treatment. Within a referent tracking system, all such entities are referred to directly and explicitly, something which cannot be achieved when familiar concept-based systems (...) are used in what is called “clinical coding”. In this paper we describe the components of a referent tracking system in an informal way and we outline the procedures that would have to be followed by healthcare personnel in using such a system. We argue that the referent tracking paradigm can be introduced with only minor – though nevertheless ontologically important – technical changes to existing EHR infrastructures, but that it will require a radically different mindset on the part of those involved in clinical coding and terminology development from that which has prevailed hitherto. (shrink)

While classifications of mental disorders have existed for over one hundred years, it still remains unspecified what terms such as 'mental disorder', 'disease' and 'illness' might actually denote. While ontologies have been called in aid to address this shortfall since the GALEN project of the early 1990s, most attempts thus far have sought to provide a formal description of the structure of some pre-existing terminology or classification, rather than of the corresponding structures and processes on the side of the patient. (...) We here present a view of mental disease that is based on ontological realism and which follows the principles embodied in Basic Formal Ontology and in the application of BFO in the Ontology of General Medical Science. We analyzed statements about what counts as a mental disease provided in the research agenda for the DSM-V, and in Pies' model. The results were used to assess whether the representational units of BFO and OGMS were adequate as foundations for a formal representation of the entities in reality that these statements attempt to describe. We then analyzed the representational units specific to mental disease and provided corresponding definitions. Our key contributions lie in the identification of confusions and conflations in the existing terminology of mental disease and in providing what we believe is a framework for the sort of clear and unambiguous reference to entities on the side of the patient that is needed in order to avoid these confusions in the future. (shrink)

Quality assurance in large terminologies is a difficult issue. We present two algorithms that can help terminology developers and users to identify potential mistakes. We demon­strate the methodology by outlining the different types of mistakes that are found when the algorithms are applied to SNOMED-CT. On the basis of the results, we argue that both formal logical and linguistic tools should be used in the development and quality-assurance process of large terminologies.

PURPOSE—A substantial fraction of the observations made by clinicians and entered into patient records are expressed by means of negation or by using terms which contain negative qualifiers (as in “absence of pulse” or “surgical procedure not performed”). This seems at first sight to present problems for ontologies, terminologies and data repositories that adhere to a realist view and thus reject any reference to putative non-existing entities. Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and Referent Tracking (RT) are examples of such paradigms. The (...) purpose of the research here described was to test a proposal to capture negative findings in electronic health record systems based on BFO and RT. METHODS—We analysed a series of negative findings encountered in 748 sentences taken from 41 patient charts. We classified the phenomena described in terms of the various top-level categories and relations defined in BFO, taking into account the role of negation in the corresponding descriptions. We also studied terms from SNOMED-CT containing one or other form of negation. We then explored ways to represent the described phenomena by means of the types of representational units available to realist ontologies such as BFO. RESULTS—We introduced a new family of ‘lacks’ relations into the OBO Relation Ontology. The relation lacks_part, for example, defined in terms of the positive relation part_of, holds between a particular p and a universal U when p has no instance of U as part. Since p and U both exist, assertions involving ‘lacks_part’ and its cognates meet the requirements of positivity. CONCLUSION—By expanding the OBO Relation Ontology, we were able to accommodate nearly all occurrences of negative findings in the sample studied. (shrink)

Ontology is currently perceived as the solution of first resort for all problems related to biomedical terminology, and the use of description logics is seen as a minimal requirement on adequate ontology-based systems. Contrary to common conceptions, however, description logics alone are not able to prevent incorrect representations; this is because they do not come with a theory indicating what is computed by using them, just as classical arithmetic does not tell us anything about the entities that are added or (...) subtracted. In this paper we shall show that ontology is indeed an essential part of any solution to the problems of medical terminology – but only if it is understood in the right sort of way. Ontological engineering, we shall argue, should in every case go hand in hand with a sound ontological theory. (shrink)

Based on the Ontology for General Medical Science, we propose definitions for biomarkers of various types of. These definitions provide not only a complete formal representation of what biomarkers are according to the Institute of Medicine (IOM), but also remove the ambiguities and inconsistencies encountered in the documentation provided by the IOM.

We present the details of a methodology for quality assurance in large medical terminologies and describe three algorithms that can help terminology developers and users to identify potential mistakes. The methodology is based in part on linguistic criteria and in part on logical and ontological principles governing sound classifications. We conclude by outlining the results of applying the methodology in the form of a taxonomy different types of errors and potential errors detected in SNOMED-CT.

If SNOMED CT is to serve as a biomedical reference terminology, then steps must be taken to ensure comparability of information formulated using successive versions. New releases are therefore shipped with a history mechanism. We assessed the adequacy of this mechanism for its treatment of the distinction between changes occurring on the side of entities in reality and changes in our understanding thereof. We found that these two types are only partially distinguished and that a more detailed study is required (...) to propose clear recommendations for enhancement along at least the following lines: (1) explicit representation of the provenance of a class; (2) separation of the time-period during which a component is stated valid in SNOMED CT from the period it is (or has been) valid in reality, and (3) redesign of the historical relationships table to give users better assistance for recovery in case of introduced mistakes. (shrink)

Against the background of the contemporary debate about financialisation, the paper conceptualises the capitalist labour economy as fundamentally a monetary system. It argues that money is not a capitalist means of organising its labour economy but that it is rather a capitalist end. The argument examines and finds wanting conceptions of money in political economy, including Keynesianism and neoliberalism, and argues that the debate about financialisation is fundamentally based on the propositions of political economy. It holds that Marx’s critique of (...) political economy conceives of money as the form of value and expounds money-making as the purpose of the capital labour economy. Thus, the labour theory of value is fundamentally a monetary theory of value, labour is the means of valorisation, and that is, of money in process, and as such capital. Making money out of money is capital as its most rational. In the form of credit, money posits wealth as a claim on future surplus value. (shrink)

There are many things that philosophy of biology might be. But, given the existence of a professional philosophy of biology that is arguably a progressive research program and, as such, unrivaled, it makes sense to define philosophy of biology more narrowly than the totality of intersecting concerns biologists and philosophers (let alone other scholars) might have. The reasons for the success of the “new” philosophy of biology remain poorly understood. I reflect on what Dutch and Flemish, and, more generally, European (...) philosophers of biology could do to improve the situation of their discipline locally, regionally, and internationally, paying particular attention to the lessons to be learned from the “Science Wars.”. (shrink)

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are organized around two kinds of statements: those reporting observations made, and those reporting acts performed. In neither case does the record involve any direct reference to what such statements are actually about. They record not: what is happening on the side of the patient, but rather: what is said about what is happening. While the need for a unique patient identifier is generally recognized, we argue that we should now move to an EHR regime in (...) which all clinically salient particulars – from the concrete disorder on the side of the patient and the body parts in which it occurs to the concrete treatments given – should be uniquely identified. This will allow us to achieve interoperability among different systems of records at the level where it really matters: in regard to what is happening in the real world. It will also allow us to keep track of particular disorders and of the effects of particular treatments in a precise and unambiguous way. We discuss the ontological and epistemological aspects of our claim and describe a scenario for implementation within EHR systems. (shrink)

The goal of the OBO (Open Biomedical Ontologies) Foundry initiative is to create and maintain an evolving collection of non-overlapping interoperable ontologies that will offer unambiguous representations of the types of entities in biological and biomedical reality. These ontologies are designed to serve non-redundant annotation of data and scientific text. To achieve these ends, the Foundry imposes strict requirements upon the ontologies eligible for inclusion. While these requirements are not met by most existing biomedical terminologies, the latter may nonetheless support (...) the Foundry’s goal of consistent and non-redundant annotation if appropriate mappings of data annotated with their aid can be achieved. To construct such mappings in reliable fashion, however, it is necessary to analyze terminological resources from an ontologically realistic perspective in such a way as to identify the exact import of the ‘concepts’ and associated terms which they contain. We propose a framework for such analysis that is designed to maximize the degree to which legacy terminologies and the data coded with their aid can be successfully used for information-driven clinical and translational research. (shrink)

The paradigm of referent tracking is based on a realist presupposition which rejects so-called negative entities (congenital absent nipple, and the like) as spurious. How, then, can a referent tracking-based Electronic Health Record deal with what are standardly called ‘negative findings’? To answer this question we carried out an analysis of some 748 sentences drawn from patient charts and containing some form of negation. Our analysis shows that to deal with these sentences we need to introduce a new ontological relationship (...) between a particular and a universal, which holds when no instance of the universal has a specific qualified ontological relation with the particular. This relation is found to be able to accommodate nearly all occurrences of negative findings in the examined sample, in ways which involve no reference to negative entities. (shrink)

Since Hegel, philosophy cannot stop thinking its end. The violent transformations which Hegel's philosophy has uncovered and caused in the structure of philosophical terms and in the terms under which philosophy is possible is Hamacher's topic. Starting from Hegel's commentaries on biblical scripture, Hamacher traces the genealogy and unfolding of Hegel's thought into his mature works--the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of History--focusing throughout on the limits and borders, the limitations and extremities of its conceptual and textual movements. (...) Because the concept for Hegel is the end of the thing--the point where it peaks--because it occurs by severance from its representational content, the trace of this splitting appears imprinted into its discursive articulation. The Hegelian text is punctuated by a series of terms and topics that operate according to the logic of the turning point: one function activating its opposite, they serve as pores between mutually exclusive experiences and establish their unity. This dialectical procedure falters, its unity dissolves, the pores turn into aporias, wherever conceptual exigencies surpass the reality they have instilled. Hamacher shows that dialectics, proceeding by way of aporias, remains unable to account for its own movement. Hegel's system must be read from the point where its rupture fails to converge with its end. Analyzing both the historical and the systematic aspects of Hegel's philosophy, addressing Kant and religious fetishism, Nietzsche and the impossible repetition of the same, Marx and the aroma of religion, Freud and the hysterical body, Hamacher's argument is directed toward what in Hegel's philosophy of spirit resists spiritualization and defeats philosophy. Aspiring to be the last philosophy, speculative idealism has to incorporate all previous systems and spiritualize its incorporation. Its logic of ingestion must, however, reject with repulsion and nausea everything that resists appropriation. Emphasizing Hegel's claim to present the political theology of modern society, Hamacher shows that the mechanism of nausea meant to keep the system intact is in fact itself a mechanism foreign to its body; it averts the promised incorporation, defeats idealization, leaves the body politic disintegrated, and voids the claim of the most powerful ontology of modern society to mark the end, the completion and plenitude--the pleroma--of philosophy and history. What remains--the indigestible, the unreadable, the nondiscursive--demands yet another kind of discourse and another practical gesture: toward a pleroma other than Hegel's. (shrink)

Referent tracking (RT) is a new paradigm, based on unique identification, for representing and keeping track of particulars. It was first introduced to support the entry and retrieval of data in electronic health records (EHRs). Its purpose is to avoid the ambiguity that arises when statements in an EHR refer to disorders or other entities on the side of the patient exclusively by means of compound descriptions utilizing general terms such as ‘pimple on nose’ or ‘small left breast tumor’. In (...) this paper, we describe the theoretical foundations of this paradigm and show how it is being applied to the solution of analogous problems of ambiguous identification in the fields of digital rights management, corporate memories and decision algorithms. (shrink)

Definitive diagnosis of malaria requires the demonstration through laboratory tests of the presence within the patient of malaria parasites or their components. Since malaria parasites can be present even in the absence of malaria manifestations, and since symptoms of malaria can be manifested even in the absence of malaria parasites, malaria diagnosis raises important issues for the adequate understanding of disease, etiology and diagnosis. One approach to the resolution of these issues adopts a realist view, according to which the needed (...) clarifications will be derived from a careful representation of the entities on the side of the patient which form the ultimate truthmakers for clinical statements. We here address a challenge to this realist approach relating to the diagnosis of malaria, and show how this challenge can be resolved by appeal to Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) and to the Ontology for General Medical Science (OGMS) constructed in its terms. (shrink)

This is the second of two articles in which I reflect on “generalized Darwinism” as currently discussed in evolutionary economics. In the companion article (Callebaut, Biol Theory 6. doi: 10.1007/s13752-013-0086-2, 2011, this issue) I approached evolutionary economics from the naturalistic perspectives of evolutionary epistemology and the philosophy of biology, contrasted evolutionary economists’ cautious generalizations of Darwinism with “imperialistic” proposals to unify the behavioral sciences, and discussed the continued resistance to biological ideas in the social sciences. Here I assess Generalized Darwinism (...) as propounded by Geoffrey Hodgson, Thorbjørn Knudsen, and others, concentrating on the roles of theory and model building in science (and the roles of analogy and metaphor therein), generative replication, and the relation between selection and self-organization. I then point to advances in current biology that promise to be more fruitful as sources of inspiration for evolutionary economics than the project to generalize Darwinism in its current, “hardened Modern Synthesis” form; and I draw some conclusions. (shrink)

This paper aims to elucidate a kind of ignorance that is more fundamental than a momentary lack of information, but also not a kind of ignorance that is built into the subject’s cognitive apparatus such that the subject can’t do anything about it. The paper sets forth the notion of cognitive confinement, which is a contingent, yet relatively stable state of being structurally or systematically unable to gain information from an environment, determined by patterns of interaction between the subject and (...) the world. In order to unpack the idea of cognitive confinement the paper discusses niche construction theory, and then, in greater detail, the notion of cognitive niche once proposed by John Tooby and Irven DeVore. Cognitive confinement is here imagined as a pathologized form of cognitive niche. This posit is substantiated by referring to a case that has come to the fore in recent years and raised debate around the world: the rise of so-called filter bubbles. They turn out to be instantiations of a more general phenomenon of cognitive confinement. (shrink)

We present a novel methodology for calculating the improvements obtained in successive versions of biomedical ontologies. The theory takes into account changes both in reality itself and in our understanding of this reality. The successful application of the theory rests on the willingness of ontology authors to document changes they make by following a number of simple rules. The theory provides a pathway by which ontology authoring can become a science rather than an art, following principles analogous to those that (...) have fostered the growth of modern evidence-based medicine. Although in this paper we focus on ontologies, the methodology can be generalized to other sorts of terminology-based artifacts, including Electronic Patient Records. (shrink)

For corporate memory and enterprise ontology systems to be maximally useful, they must be freed from certain barriers placed around them by traditional knowledge management paradigms. This means, above all, that they must mirror more faithfully those portions of reality which are salient to the workings of the enterprise, including the changes that occur with the passage of time. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate how theories based on philosophical realism can contribute to this objective. We discuss how (...) realism-based ontologies (capturing what is generic) combined with referent tracking (capturing what is specific) can play a key role in building the robust and useful corporate memories of the future. (shrink)

The integration of information resources in the life sciences is one of the most challenging problems facing bioinformatics today. We describe how Language and Computing nv, originally a developer of ontology-based natural language understanding systems for the healthcare domain, is developing a framework for the integration of structured data with unstructured information contained in natural language texts. L&C’s LinkSuite™ combines the flexibility of a modular software architecture with an ontology based on rigorous philosophical and logical principles that is designed to (...) comprehend the basic formal relationships that structure both reality and the ways humans perceive and communicate about reality. (shrink)

Semantic interoperability can be defined as the ability of two or more computer systems to exchange information in such a way that the meaning of that information can be automatically interpreted by the receiving system accurately enough to produce useful results to the end users of both systems. Several activities are currently being performed by a variety of stakeholders to achieve semantic interoperability in healthcare. Many of these activities are not beneficial, because they place too great a focus on business (...) aspects and not enough on involvement of the right sorts of researchers, in particular those that are able to see how the data and information relate to the entities of concern on the side of the patient. The lack of a central focus on the patient, and the associated focus on ‘concepts’, have spawned a variety of mutually incompatible terminologies exhibiting non-resolvable overlap. The predominance of the healthcare IT industry in the writing and selection of semantic interoperability standards mitigates against the benefits that standards, when well designed, can bring about. (shrink)

The engineering-based approach of synthetic biology is characterized by an assumption that ‘engineering by design’ enables the construction of ‘living machines’. These ‘machines’, as biological machines, are expected to display certain properties of life, such as adapting to changing environments and acting in a situated way. This paper proposes that a tension exists between the expectations placed on biological artefacts and the notion of producing such systems by means of engineering; this tension makes it seem implausible that biological systems, especially (...) those with properties characteristic of living beings, can in fact be produced using the specific methods of engineering. We do not claim that engineering techniques have nothing to contribute to the biotechnological construction of biological artefacts. However, drawing on Descartes’s and Kant’s thinking on the relationship between the organism and the machine, we show that it is considerably more plausible to assume that distinctively biological artefacts emerge within a paradigm different from the paradigm of the Cartesian machine that underlies the engineering approach. We close by calling for increased attention to be paid to approaches within molecular biology and chemistry that rest on conceptions different from those of synthetic biology’s engineering paradigm. (shrink)

Health Level 7 (HL7) is an organization seeking to provide universal standards for the exchange of healthcare information. In a document entitled ‘HL7 Version 3 Standard: Data Types’, the HL7 organization advances descriptions of data types recom- mended for use as identifiers. We will argue that the descriptions supplied provide insufficient guidance as to what exactly the entities are which these data types uniquely identify. Are they real things, such as persons or pieces of equipment? Or are they representations of (...) such real things in information artifacts? We here outline the problems faced by HL7 in providing answers to such questions, problems which arise because of the lack of anything like a coherent ontology in the HL7 standard, and we make some recommendations for future improvements. (shrink)

Ontologies are today being applied in almost every field to support the alignment and retrieval of data of distributed provenance. Here we focus on new ontological work on dance and on related cultural phenomena belonging to what UNESCO calls the “intangible heritage.” Currently data and information about dance, including video data, are stored in an uncontrolled variety of ad hoc ways. This serves not only to prevent retrieval, comparison and analysis of the data, but may also impinge on our ability (...) to preserve the data that already exists. Here we explore recent technological developments that are designed to counteract such problems by allowing information to be retrieved across disciplinary, cultural, linguistic and technological boundaries. Software applications such as the ones envisaged here will enable speedier recovery of data and facilitate its analysis in ways that will assist both archiving of and research on dance. (shrink)

Ontological realism aims at the development of high quality ontologies that faithfully represent what is general in reality and to use these ontologies to render heterogeneous data collections comparable. To achieve this second goal for clinical research datasets presupposes not merely (1) that the requisite ontologies already exist, but also (2) that the datasets in question are faithful to reality in the dual sense that (a) they denote only particulars and relationships between particulars that do in fact exist and (b) (...) they do this in terms of the types and type-level relationships described in these ontologies. While much attention has been devoted to (1), work on (2), which is the topic of this paper, is comparatively rare. Using Referent Tracking as basis, we describe a technical data wrangling strategy which consists in creating for each dataset a template that, when applied to each particular record in the dataset, leads to the generation of a collection of Referent Tracking Tuples (RTT) built out of unique identifiers for the entities described by means of the data items in the record. The proposed strategy is based on (i) the distinction between data and what data are about, and (ii) the explicit descriptions of portions of reality which RTTs provide and which range not only over the particulars described by data items in a dataset, but also over these data items themselves. This last feature allows us to describe particulars that are only implicitly referred to by the dataset; to provide information about correspondences between data items in a dataset; and to assert which data items are unjustifiably or redundantly present in or absent from the dataset. The approach has been tested on a dataset collected from patients seeking treatment for orofacial pain at two German universities and made available for the NIDCR-funded OPMQoL project. (shrink)

One way to detect, monitor and prevent adverse events with the help of Information Technology is by using ontologies capable of representing three levels of reality: what is the case, what is believed about reality, and what is represented. We report on how Basic Formal Ontology and Referent Tracking exhibit this capability and how they are used to develop an adverse event ontology and related data annotation scheme for the European ReMINE project.

Legal theory usually distinguishes only two kinds of legal realism: the American and the Scandinavian. Another school of this theoretical perspective is German legal realism, which refers to scholars like Ihering, Weber, and Schelsky. According to German legal realism, the author outlines what legal theory can do to persuade modern jurisprudence to face the social reality of law, conceived as institutionalized normative communication. The latter always occurs with reference to already valid and effectively operative legal norms which are used in (...) an established, normatively binding legal practice in a given regional society. (shrink)

Equipped with the ultimate query answering system, computers would finally be in a position to address all our information needs in a natural way. In this paper, we describe how Language and Computing nv (L&C), a developer of ontology-based natural language understanding systems for the healthcare domain, is working towards the ultimate Question Answering (QA) System for healthcare workers. L&C’s company strategy in this area is to design in a step-by-step fashion the essential components of such a system, each component (...) being designed to solve some one part of the total problem and at the same time reflect well-defined needs on the prat of our customers. We compare our strategy with the research roadmap proposed by the Question Answering Committee of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), paying special attention to the role of ontology. (shrink)