Research in Digital Humanities calls for computational systems to document, compare, and analyze interpretations of cultural artifacts such as literary texts. These systems are intended to support scholars, critics, and students by facilitating access to existing analyses of texts, identifying similarities and divergences between interpretations, and more. We propose an approach for documenting interpretations of literary characters, grounded in the empirical practices of literary interpretation to align closely with experts’ methods. To achieve this, we remain neutral regarding the ontological status of characters, instead relying on formal approaches based on linguistics. We demonstrate how our approach can analyze relations between names of fictional characters across texts and authors, bridging discussions in analytic philosophy about identity with the interests of literary scholars.

In many application domains, it is common to talk not only about the entities populating that domain, but also about statements (aka claims) that are expressed about those very entities. This is particularly the case in the Humanities, e.g., when scholars express their critical statements about paintings, literary texts, musical works, etc. The ontological modeling of such claims is challenging for various reasons, e.g., because one needs to capture their subjective but also public dimension, because scholars may express contrasting statements about the same phenomena, or because the argumentative logic of scholarly reasoning does not squarely fit into the methods of mathematical logic. Building on previous work on the treatment of observations and being driven by concrete case studies, we propose the first steps for an ontology to document scholarly statements and to trace critical debates in literary studies.

We investigate the construction of time in EMMO, a foundational ontology developed to improve the strictness in the representation of applied sciences’ knowledge. We show how temporal individuals and temporal relations can be defined from the primitives of causation and parthood, at the core of EMMO; we then prove that our construction satisfies van Benthem’s requirements for temporal structures. Our analysis contributes to clarifying the overall landscape of causal relational theories of time, and to the ongoing effort of aligning foundational ontologies. We conclude by sketching how our results can be generalised, employing a strategy to simulate relations’ transitive closure in FOL. This generalisation makes the described construction of time exploitable in ontology engineering with minimal preconditions and sets up the groundwork for a systematic analysis of the connections between (discrete) causal and temporal structures.

Forests, cars and orchestras are very different ontological entities, and yet very similar in some aspects. The relationships they have with the elements they are composed of is often assumed to be reducible to standard ontological relations, like parthood and constitution, but how this could be done is still debated. This paper sheds light on the issue starting from a linguistic and philosophical analysis aimed at understanding notions like plurality, collective and composite, and proposing a formal approach to characterise them. We conclude the presentation with a discussion and analysis of social groups within this framework.

How can organisations survive not only the substitution of members, but also other dramatic changes, like that of the norms regulating their activities, the goals they plan to achieve, or the system of roles that compose them? This paper is as first step towards a well-founded ontological analysis of the persistence of organisations through changes. Our analysis leverages Kit Fine's notions of rigid and variable embodiment and proposes to view the (history of the) decisions made by the members of the organisation as the criterion to re-identify the organisation through change.

A concept is traditionally defined via the necessary and sufficient conditions that clearly determine its extension. By contrast, cognitive views of concepts intend to account for empirical data that show that categorisation under a concept presents typicality effects and a certain degree of indeterminacy. We propose a formal language to compactly represent concepts by leveraging on weighted logical formulas. In this way, we can model the possible synergies among the qualities that are relevant for categorising an object under a concept. We show that our proposal can account for a number of views of concepts such as the prototype theory and the exemplar theory. Moreover, we show how the proposed model can overcome some limitations of cognitive views.

Structural universals have been introduced in the philosophical literature on examples such as chemical molecules composed of bonded atoms of different kinds. They are useful to handle complex abstract entities such as designs of artefacts, shapes, strings, words and texts, relevant in many areas of applied ontology. We use graph-theory as a unifying framework to review and compare the formal accounts proposed by Armstrong, Bennett and Mormann. We then propose a more expressive account, combining features of Bennett's and Mormann's proposals, able to model both the mereology of complex states of affairs and the structure of the particulars involved in them. Structural universals are explicitly represented; their structure, where a same universal can be part of a structural universal several times over, can be read off the graphs representing complex states of affairs.

We introduce a first-oder theory where observations are reified into the domain of quantification. Observations have an epistemological nature, they describe how the world appears, not as the world is. Our primitive notions allow to represent how some observations are explained in terms of more simple ones or how they are aggregated into macro-indexes. We analyze in detail the cases of measurement and testing where observations are collected through calibrated devices and eventually aggregated into scores. Our framework is based on a decoupling between the observations and the propositions that belong to the temporally qualified A-box. It allows contradictory observations, but it requires these disagreements to be resolved via a merging process that identifies, among the contradictory observations, the most plausible one that can then be safely transferred into the A-box.

We argue that a cognitive semantics has to take into account the possibly partial information that a cognitive agent has of the world. After discussing Gärdenfors's view of objects in conceptual spaces, we offer a number of viable treatments of partiality of information and we formalize them by means of alternative predicative logics. Our analysis shows that understanding the nature of simple predicative sentences is crucial for a cognitive semantics.

Product structures are represented in engineering models by depicting and linking components, features and assemblies. Their understanding requires knowledge of both design and manufacturing practices, and yet further contextual reasoning is needed to read them correctly. Since these representations are essential to the engineering activities, the lack of a clear and explicit semantics of these models hampers the use of information systems for their assessment and exploitation. We study this problem by identifying different interpretations of structure representations, and then discuss the formal properties that a suitable language needs for representing components, features and combinations of these. We show that the representation of components and features require a non-standard mereology.

In the last decade, the debate about the ontological foundations of reified temporal logics (RTLs) has been relatively quiet, even though we think some problems still exist. In this paper, we identify some of these problems and propose (partial) solutions to them in a FOL framework. States are here characterized (at the syntactic level) as truth-makers of propositions—they reify true propositions—and events are built from states. These choices make the event-state distinction much crisper than the one characterized in terms of the (meta-)predicates HOLDS vs. OCCURS, which are necessary in RTLs but not in our theory. We also offer some epistemological arguments in favor of this choice.

In the context of business process modelling, the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is a de-facto standard with more than 70 commercial tools that currently support its use. Amongst its main modelling constructs, BPMN includes activities and events. However, the focus of the standard is on providing an intuitive graphical language, rather than formal semantics specifications. This results in semantic ambiguities regarding the interpretation of its modelling constructs. We investigate whether the main building blocks of BPMN commit to an ontological theory of the domain entities at hand, eventually clarifying this commitment by the approach of ontological analysis.

In this paper we present an ontological framework for modeling the core concepts of personal income taxes, based on the Italian law. The ontological analysis focuses on an high-level conceptualization of the main principles of tax legislation, and is largely based on contributions from legal doctrine and the most relevant Italian Constitutional Court's decisions in tax law. As such, the model may serve as a framework to be specialized by further ontological modules. In addition to the core ontological concepts of tax domain, an emphasis is given to the norms application process, which we believe helps to explain the complicated way taxes are imposed. In our approach, the final result of this process is a tax position, which accounts for the relationship between the taxpayer and the treasury with respect to a particular tribute.

Moving from some reflections on the empirical practice of measurement and on the nature of visual perception, we present a constructivist approach to objects. At the basis of such approach there is the idea that all we may know about what is out there is always mediated by some sort of apparatus, being it a measurement instrument or our perceptual system. Given this perspective, some questions are in order: how are objects identified and re-identified through time from the outcomes of apparatuses? How can we distinguish different (kinds of) objects? Our first goal will be to make explicit the mechanism used to build objects from the apparatuses' outcomes, emphasizing what are the ontological and representational problems this construction faces. A second contribution will be a preliminary discussion of some possible ways to distinguish social objects, the constructed objects par excellence, from physical ones. A third contribution will be an attempt to make a bridge between two scientific communities that rarely seek contact or mutual recognition: that of formal ontologies and that of formal concept analysis.

Taking for granted an ontological standpoint independent of any empirical or epistemological perspective, philosophical theories of properties are actually quite rarely adopted in the knowledge representation community. The theory of qualities introduced in the DOLCE-CORE ontology [4] allows for representing different viewpoints on the world in a unified framework but it does not refer to any process used in empirical or epistemic investigations. In this paper, I will found the theory of qualities on the measurement theory proposed in [8]. In this new perspective, the stability of properties is not assumed a priori but it is founded on the stability of specific (physical) objects: the measurement systems and standards.

The purpose of this paper is to examine different modelling strategies available in a multiplicative formal ontology, and the principles that drive their choice. This study is based on the results of recent work aiming at extending the foundational ontology DOLCE to grasp two quite different notions, that of artefact and that of role. These results, summarized in the paper, show that two multiplicative modelling strategies, entity stacking and property reification, are essential in both cases.

An elegant framework called INDU (Pujari et al., Proc. Australian Conf. AI, 1999) has been proposed for representing qualitative information about time intervals and durations. INDU is a single network, therefore it avoids typical problems of bi-networks, and in addition it has interesting computational properties. We extend INDU in two directions: we enrich its expressive power introducing points and maintaining the same computational properties, and we provide it with an axiomatic theory able to handle qualitative temporal information about points, intervals and durations in a unified framework. This theory is based on general interval entities and two relations: "general meets" and "not longer than".