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13There are No Matters of OpinionTeaching Philosophy 26 (3): 247-259. 2003.This paper contends that an effective way to elicit student interest in philosophical problems is to engage them in controversies they care about. The author describes an exercise that introduces basic elements of rational discourse, e.g. truth, belief, facts, rational disagreement, by questioning whether there any matters of opinion. In addition to providing an argument why there are no matters of opinion, the paper describes standard student responses and counterexamples to being told there ar…Read more
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674A Spatio-Temporal Ontology for Geographic Information IntegrationInternational Journal for Geographical Information Science 23 (6): 765-798. 2009.This paper presents an axiomatic formalization of a theory of top-level relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the sub-universal relation among universals and the parthood relation among individuals, as well as cross-categorial relations such as instantiation and membership. We show that an adequate understanding of the formal properties of such relations – in pa…Read more
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40The RNA Ontology (RNAO): an ontology for integrating RNA sequence and structure dataApplied ontology 6 (1): 53-89. 2011.
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110Logical properties of foundational mereogeometrical relations in bio-ontologiesApplied ontology 4 (2): 109-138. 2009.
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Spatial Information Theory. Foundations of Geographic Information ScienceLecture Notes in Computer Science 2205. 2001.
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49Formal ontology of space, time, and physical entities in classical mechanicsApplied ontology 13 (2): 135-179. 2018.
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136Summation relations and portions of stuffPhilosophical Studies 143 (2). 2009.According to the prevalent 'sum view' of stuffs, each portion of stuff is a mereological sum of its subportions. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the sum view in the light of a modal temporal mereology which distinguishes between different varieties of summation relations. While admitting David Barnett's recent counter-example to the sum view, we show that there is nonetheless an important sense in which all portions of stuff are sums of their subportions. We use our summation relation…Read more
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2Chris Nunn, Awareness: What it is, What it does Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 16 (6): 426-428. 1996.
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2Parity cuts both ways: split brains and extended cognitionTeorema: International Journal of Philosophy 30 (2): 19-34. 2011.
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116In R. Holte and A. Howe (eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07).
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651Basic Formal Ontology for bioinformaticsIFOMIS Reports. 2005.Two senses of ‘ontology’ can be distinguished in the current literature. First is the sense favored by information scientists, who view ontologies as software implementations designed to capture in some formal way the consensus conceptualization shared by those working on information systems or databases in a given domain. [Gruber 1993] Second is the sense favored by philosophers, who regard ontologies as theories of different types of entities (objects, processes, relations, functions) [Smith…Read more
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181The logic of systems of granular partitionsIFOMIS Reports. 2005.The theory of granular partitions is designed to capture in a formal framework important aspects of the selective character of common-sense views of reality. It comprehends not merely the ways in which we can view reality by conceiving its objects as gathered together not merely into sets, but also into wholes of various kinds, partitioned into parts at various levels of granularity. We here represent granular partitions as triples consisting of a rooted tree structure as first component, a doma…Read more
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212Directly depicting granular ontologiesIn Thomas Bittner & Barry Smith (eds.), Directly depicting granular ontologies, . pp. 117--151. 2004.Published in extended form as "Endurants and Perdurants in Directly Depicting Ontologies", We propose an ontological theory that is powerful enough to describe both complex spatio-temporal processes and the enduring entities that participate in such processes. For this purpose we distinguish between ontologies and metaontology. Ontologies are based on very simple directly depicting languages and fall into two major categories: ontologies of type SPAN and ontologies of type SNAP. These represent …Read more
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519Normalizing medical ontologies using Basic Formal OntologyIn K. Versorgung & V. Forschung (eds.), Ubiquitäre Information (Proceedings of GMDS 2004), Videel Ohg. pp. 199-201. 2004.Description Logics are nowadays widely accepted as formalisms which provide reasoning facilities which allow us to discover inconsistencies in ontologies in an automatic fashion. Where ontologies are developed in modular fashion, they allow changes in one module to propogated through the system of ontologies automatically in a way which helps to maintain consistency and stability. For this feature to be utilized effectively, however, requires that domain ontologies be represented in a normalized…Read more
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484Granular Spatio-Temporal OntologiesIn Thomas Bittner & Barry Smith (eds.), AAAI Symposium: Foundations and Applications of Spatio-Temporal Reasoning (FASTR), . pp. 12-17. 2003.We propose an ontological theory that is powerful enough to describe both complex spatio-temporal processes (occurrents) and the enduring entities (continuants) that participate therein. The theory is divided into two major categories of sub-theories: (sub-) theories of type SPAN and (sub-)theories of type SNAP. These theories represent two complementary perspectives on reality and result in distinct though compatible systems of categories. In SNAP we have enduring entities such as substances,…Read more
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357Vague Reference and Approximating JudgementsSpatial Cognition and Computation 3 (2). 2003.We propose a new account of vagueness and approximation in terms of the theory of granular partitions. We distinguish different kinds of crisp and non-crisp granular partitions and we describe the relations between them, concentrating especially on spatial examples. We describe the practice whereby subjects use regular grid-like reference partitions as a means for tempering the vagueness of their judgments, and we demonstrate how the theory of reference partitions can yield a natural account of …Read more
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30On the computational realization of formal ontologies: Formalizing an ontology of instantiation in spacetime using Isabelle/HOL as a case studyApplied ontology 14 (3): 251-292. 2019.
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265Formal ontologies of space and time. IFOMIS ReportIn Thomas Bittner & Barry Smith (eds.), IFOMIS Report, . 2003.We propose an ontological theory that is powerful enough to describe both complex spatio-temporal processes (occurrents) and the enduring entities (continuants) that participate in such processes. For this purpose we distinguish between meta-ontology and token ontologies. Token ontologies fall into two major categories: ontologies of type SPAN and ontologies of type SNAP. These represent two complementary perspectives on reality and result in distinct though compatible systems of categories. The…Read more
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564Granular Partitions and VaguenessIn Barry Smith & Christopher Welty (eds.), Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS), Acm Press. pp. 309-320. 2001.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 this view, but there are, for each vague name, multiple portions of reality that are equally good candidates for being its referent, and, for each vague predicate, multiple classes of objects that are equally good candidates for being its extensio…Read more
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332Endurants and Perdurants in Directly Depicting OntologiesAI Communications 13 (4). 2004.We propose an ontological theory that is powerful enough to describe both complex spatio-temporal processes and the enduring entities that participate therein. For this purpose we introduce the notion a directly depicting ontology. Directly depicting ontologies are based on relatively simple languages and fall into two major categories: ontologies of type SPAN and ontologies of type SNAP. These represent two complementary perspectives on reality and employ distinct though compatible systems of c…Read more
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500A Taxonomy of Granular PartitionsIn Thomas Bittner (ed.), Spatial Information Theory. Foundations of Geographic Information Science, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2205. pp. 28-43. 2001.In this paper we propose a formal theory of partitions (ways of dividing up or sorting or mapping reality) and we show how the theory can be applied in the geospatial domain. We characterize partitions at two levels: as systems of cells (theory A), and in terms of their projective relation to reality (theory B). We lay down conditions of well-formedness for partitions and we define what it means for partitions to project truly onto reality. We continue by classifying well-formed partitions along…Read more
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603A Theory of Granular PartitionsIn Matt Duckham, Michael F. Goodchild & Michael Worboys (eds.), Foundations of Geographic Information Science, Taylor & Francis. pp. 117-151. 2003.We have a variety of different ways of dividing up, classifying, mapping, sorting and listing the objects in reality. The theory of granular partitions presented here seeks to provide a general and unified basis for understanding such phenomena in formal terms that is more realistic than existing alternatives. Our theory has two orthogonal parts: the first is a theory of classification; it provides an account of partitions as cells and subcells; the second is a theory of reference or intentional…Read more
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258A unified theory of granularity, vagueness and approximationIn Bittner Thomas & Smith Barry (eds.), COSIT Workshop on Spatial Vagueness, Uncertainty and Granularity, . pp. 39. 2001.Abstract: We propose a view of vagueness as a semantic property of names and predicates. All entities are crisp, on this semantic view, but there are, for each vague name, multiple portions of reality that are equally good candidates for being its referent, and, for each vague predicate, multiple classes of objects that are equally good candidates for being its extension. We provide a new formulation of these ideas in terms of a theory of granular partitions. We show that this theory provides a …Read more