Ludger Jansen

It is widespread practice to define artefacts as entities that owe their existence to plan-based acts of production that aim at a certain use of the produced thing. According to this definition, artefacts are essentially intention-dependent. For this reason, artefacts are threatened by marginalisation within standard naturalised ontologies. I discuss three families of marginalisation strategies: elimination, reduction and supervenience. I argue that all of these strategies fail, as they lead to false implications, with the possible exception of four-dimensional supervenience, which might well be true, but remains completely uninformative in respect to artefacts. The crucial issue in this regard is what Peter van Inwagen calls the Duplication Principle which is undermined by thought experiments involving chance entities or duplication. Hence, materialistic ontologies are not, as Peter van Inwagen wants us to believe, a Copernican revolution in ontology; they are simply not adequate for the domain of artefacts

Starting from the early treatise "On Being and Essence", I review issues concerning substances composed of matter and form: their hylomorphic composition, individuation, essence as part and as whole, and the analogy between genus/difference and matter/form. Then I discuss substances separated from matter, which may range from human souls and angels (or intelligences) to God. I then turn to Aquinas's later 'Summa Theologica', where he argues that in the end God cannot possibly belong to the category of substance and discuss possible reasons for Aquinas conflicting accounts on this question.

Dieses Buch betritt Neuland. Es ist eine Einführung in das neue Gebiet der angewandten Ontologie, jenem multidisziplinären Arbeitsgebiet, in dem Philosophen gemeinsam mit Informatikern und Vertretern der jeweils thematischen Wissenschaftsbereiche, in unserem Fall mit Biologen und Medizinern, daran arbeiten, wissenschaftliches Wissen informationstechnisch zu repräsentieren. Es zeigt, wie Philosophie eine praktische Anwendung findet, die von zunehmender Wichtigkeit nicht nur in den heutigen Lebenswissenschaften ist. Und so richtet sich dieses Buch an Philosophen, aber auch an interessierte Biologen, Mediziner und Informatiker.

Background Ontology Design Patterns (ODPs) are representational artifacts devised to offer solutions for recurring ontology design problems. They promise to enhance the ontology building process in terms of flexibility, re-usability and expansion, and to make the result of ontology engineering more predictable. In this paper, we analyze ODP repositories and investigate their relation with upper-level ontologies. In particular, we compare the BioTop upper ontology to the Action ODP from the NeOn an ODP repository. In view of the differences in the respective approaches, we investigate whether the Action ODP can be embedded into BioTop. We demonstrate that this requires re-interpreting the meaning of classes of the NeOn Action ODP in the light of the precepts of realist ontologies. Results As a result, the re-design required clarifying the ontological commitment of the ODP classes by assigning them to top-level categories. Thus, ambiguous definitions are avoided. Classes of real entities are clearly distinguished from classes of information artifacts. The proposed approach avoids the commitment to the existence of unclear future entities which underlies the NeOn Action ODP. Our re-design is parsimonious in the sense that existing BioTop content proved to be largely sufficient to define the different types of actions and plans. Conclusions The proposed model demonstrates that an expressive upper-level ontology provides enough resources and expressivity to represent even complex ODPs, here shown with the different flavors of Action as proposed in the NeOn ODP. The advantage of ODP inclusion into a top-level ontology is the given predetermined dependency of each class, an existing backbone structure and well-defined relations. Our comparison shows that the use of some ODPs is more likely to cause problems for ontology developers, rather than to guide them. Besides the structural properties, the explanation of classification results were particularly hard to grasp for 'self-sufficient' ODPs as compared with implemented and 'embedded' upper-level structures which, for example in the case of BioTop, offer a detailed description of classes and relations in an axiomatic network. This ensures unambiguous interpretation and provides more concise constraints to leverage on in the ontology engineering process.