Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a process for managing construction project information in such a way as to provide a basis for enhanced decision-making and for collaboration in a construction supply chain. One impediment to the uptake of BIM is the limited interoperability of different BIM systems. To overcome this problem, a set of Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) has been proposed as a standard for the construction industry. Building on IFC, the ifcOWL ontology was developed in order to facilitate representation (...) of building data in a consistent fashion across the Web by using the Web Ontology Language (OWL). This study presents a critical analysis of the ifcOWL ontology and of the associated interoperability issues. It shows how these issues can be resolved by using Basic Formal Ontology (ISO/IEC 21838-2) as top-level architecture. A set of competency questions is used as the basis for comparison of the original ifcOWL with the enhanced ontology, and the latter is used to align with a second ontology – the ontology for building intelligent environments (DOGONT) – in order to demonstrate the added value derived from BFO by showing how querying the enhanced ifcOWL yields useful additional information. (shrink)

There has been a marked increase in the active involvement of children and young people in social research. This move is underpinned by rights based arguments that children and young people should have a voice, and that this voice should be listened to. However, concerns have been raised about the appropriateness of children’s and young people’s rights and participation in research. This is primarily due to queries over whether they have enough capacity to enact the individual agency required to be (...) rights holders and participate in research. In addition, a focus on their inherent vulnerability continues to be a key feature of research ethics protocols. In this paper I argue that both capacity and vulnerability should be seen as socially produced, meaning that the scope for capacity to be increased and vulnerability decreased also lies within the social. I draw from notions of relational autonomy or ‘associational presence’ to argue that what children and young people need to be active participants in research is the creation of spaces within which relational agency can be nurtured and sustained. Such techniques and values are found in participatory research approaches and can be used to create such emancipatory environments. (shrink)

By exploring whether nanotechnologies have the potential to generate green innovations, we consider the paradox between the negative and positive side-effects that could come with the development of nanotechnologies. Starting from the conceptual framework of green product innovation, the potential green innovation activity of more than 14,000 firms of the nanotech sector is investigated. Using a query-search method, their patenting activity is explored. Results first show that there is an increasing trend toward the creation of fundamental green knowledge by (...) firms involved in nanotechnologies; second, they demonstrate that energy efficiency is the main driver of green knowledge creation in the sector and third they reveal the main characteristics of nanotech firms creating green knowledge. Beyond their contribution to the debate between positive and negative outcomes of nanotechnology developments, these results also enrich the conceptual framework of green product innovation—a key route to achieving sustainability at the same time as growth. (shrink)

A variety of legal documents are increasingly being made available in electronic format. Automatic Information Search and Retrieval algorithms play a key role in enabling efficient access to such digitized documents. Although keyword-based search is the traditional method used for text retrieval, they perform poorly when literal term matching is done for query processing, due to synonymy and ambivalence of words. To overcome these drawbacks, an ontological framework to enhance the user’s query for retrieval of truly relevant legal (...) judgments has been proposed in this paper. Ontologies ensure efficient retrieval by enabling inferences based on domain knowledge, which is gathered during the construction of the knowledge base. Empirical results demonstrate that ontology-based searches generate significantly better results than traditional search methods. (shrink)

In “Is Penalty Enhancement a Sound Idea?” Claudia Card calls into question hate crime legislation, querying whether hatred makes a crime worse, whether hatred of the sort pertinent to hate crimes is worse than a more personal hatred, and whether the message sent by hate crime legislation is the intended message. This essay questions her assumption that penalty enhancement for hate crimes is warranted only if the crimes are worse than otherwise similar crimes that do not count as (...) hate crimes. Instead, it may be the case that it is the proper business of the state to take a particular interest in such crimes, in part because they enact not just any hatred but civic hatred. And if hate crimes are understood as enacting civic hatred, hate crime legislation can indeed serve to counter a message that very much needs to be countered. (shrink)

Achieving space situational awareness requires, at a minimum, the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Leveraging the resultant space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and conjunction assessment presents major challenges. This is in part because in characterizing space objects we reference a variety of identifiers, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, operational processes, operational statuses, and so forth, which tend to be defined in highly heterogeneous and sometimes inconsistent (...) ways. The Space Domain Ontologies are designed to provide a consensus-based realist framework for formulating such characterizations in a way that is both consistent and computable. Space object data are aligned with classes and relations in a suite of ontologies built around the existing Space Object Ontology. They are stored in a dynamically updated Resource Description Framework triple store, which can be queried to support space situational awareness and the needs of spacecraft operators and analysts. This paper provides an overview of the Space Domain Ontologies and their development and use. It presents the motivation for and advantages of the Space Domain Ontologies, including the benefits they provide for enhancing and maintaining long-term space situational awareness. (shrink)

Achieving space domain awareness requires the identification, characterization, and tracking of space objects. Storing and leveraging associated space object data for purposes such as hostile threat assessment, object identification, and collision prediction and avoidance present further challenges. Space objects are characterized according to a variety of parameters including their identifiers, design specifications, components, subsystems, capabilities, vulnerabilities, origins, missions, orbital elements, patterns of life, processes, operational statuses, and associated persons, organizations, or nations. The Space Object Ontology provides a consensus-based realist framework (...) for formulating such characterizations in a computable fashion. Space object data are aligned with classes and relations in the Space Object Ontology and stored in a dynamically updated Resource Description Framework triple store, which can be queried to support space domain awareness and the needs of spacecraft operators. This paper presents the core of the Space Object Ontology, discusses its advantages over other approaches to space object classification, and demonstrates its ability to combine diverse sets of data from multiple sources within an expandable framework. Finally, we show how the ontology provides benefits for enhancing and maintaining longterm space domain awareness. (shrink)

This paper presents an enhanced ontology formalization, combining previous work in Conceptual Structure Theory and Order-Sorted Logic. Most existing ontology formalisms place greater importance on concept types, but in this paper we focus on relation types, which are in essence predicates on concept types. We formalize the notion of ‘predicate of predicates’ as meta-relation type and introduce the new hierarchy of meta-relation types as part of the ontology definition. The new notion of closure of a relation or meta-relation type is (...) presented as a means to complete that relation or meta-relation type by transferring extra arguments and properties from other related types. The end result is an expanded ontology, called the closure of the original ontology, on which automated inference could be more easily performed. Our proposal could be viewed as a novel and improved ontology formalization within Conceptual Structure Theory and a contribution to knowledge representation and formal reasoning (e.g., to build a query-answering system for legal knowledge). (shrink)

This paper assesses the potential of organisational culture as a means for improving ethics in organisations. Organisational culture is recognised as one determinant of how people behave, more or less ethically, in organisations. It is also incresingly understood as an attribute that management can and should influence to improve organisational performance. When things go wrong in organisations, managers look to the culture as both the source of problems and the basis for solutions. Two models of organisational culture and ethical behaviour (...) are evaluated. They rest on different understandings of organisational culture and the processes by which ethics are enhanced. Firstly, the prevailing approach holds that creating a unitary cohesive culture around core moral values is the solution to enhancing ethical behaviour. Both the feasibility and desirability of this approach, in terms of ethical outcomes, is questioned. The second model queries the existence of organisational culture at all, arguing that organisations are nothing more than shifting coalitions of subcultures. In this second model, the very porousness of the subcultures provides a catalyst for the scrutiny and critique of norms and practices. Such diversity and debate is construed as potentially a better safeguard for ethical behaviour than the uniformity promised by the unitary, strong culture model. (shrink)

Large language models (LLMs) represent the currently most relevant incarnation of artificial intelligence with respect to the future fate of democratic governance. Considering their potential, this paper seeks to answer a pressing question: Could LLMs outperform humans as expert advisors to democratic assemblies? While bearing the promise of enhanced expertise availability and accessibility, they also present challenges of hallucinations, misalignment, or value imposition. Weighing LLMs’ benefits and drawbacks compared to their human counterparts, I argue for their careful integration to augment (...) democracy’s ability to address complex policy issues. The paper posits that time-tested democratic procedures like deliberation and aggregation by voting provide safeguards effective against both human and machine advisor imperfections. Additional protective measures include custom LLM training for the advisory role, boosting representatives’ competencies in query formulation, or implementation of adversarial proceedings in which LLM advisors could debate each other and provide dissenting opinions. These could further mitigate the risks that LLMs present in advisory roles and empower human decision-makers toward increased autonomy and quality of their collective choices. My conceptual exploration offers a roadmap for the co-evolution of AI and democratic institutions, setting the stage for an empirical research agenda to finetune the implementation specifics. (shrink)

Which and how much of our current drives –individually and as a global community– are driven by ancestral, inherited traits or imprinted on our animal condition? An attempt to approximate this intriguing query is explored here. It pertains to our identity, social constructions, and our ecological interaction. The origin of our species has its roots in ancestral habits, behaviors and a survival drive, transformed from changing environmental conditions. We were not born in a mother-of-pearl cradle nor were protected by (...) magical agents. We grew on the thread of time within the complex nature of bio-ecological interactions. They carved our identity, our genetic expression and the possible origin of our beliefs, resulting in an arch of various behaviors and cultural phenotypes. The biological nature of our construction dragged through millennia through species trials with variable rates of survival times provided traces of inconstant and multiple evolutive chains. Our modern cultural contexts –norms, priorities, values– appear as newly born. Yet, socio-cultural ecology upon which our brain organization and behavioral constructs derive include shared basic behavioral drives with non-human primates. The emergence of humans with a sophisticated language allowed the development of complex virtual constructs based on symbolism and the instruments of culture. This has enhanced cognitive capacity and emotional interaction supported by processes anchored in neural networks distributed within cortical and subcortical levels. Basic, essential neural connectivities were preserved during the evolutionary development of the species. The biological matrix and inheritance are usually segregated from the social and cultural construction. Sophistication of our cultural development tends to set up a divisive fault from primitive foundations of non-human animal behavior (survival, territory, reproduction, prevalence, access to nutrients). These are basic templates and underlie essential individual and group basic drives, and cultural constructs. Humans have not ceased from being territorial (whether applied to virtual or material dimensions). Various forms of social inequities have been expressed in our time and through human history. On evolutive terms, the notion of individual social status within the social structure of a gregarious community generated the probability of an individual ascending or descending that hierarchy. Thus, becoming a potential figure of leadership, or the subordinate or the marginalized. Is there an evolutive antecedent for human social inequities? How do we construct a different future? Post-industrial societies became increasingly dependent on material consumerism and technological cultures, to the point of embraining them; conceptually becoming technological hybrids. Are these a developmental must, or an uncontrolled spin-off of human inventiveness affecting our future? Construction of supernatural agents played a significant role in the socialization/domestication processes. Agents’ intentionality flourished through altered states of conscience, or under fear of natural phenomena attributed to supposed inhabitants of the Natural Kingdom or virtual beings. This imaginary universe, reinforced by ritual behaviors, contributed to control personal/collective distress of various possible origins and conditioned our degrees of emotional and cognitive freedom. (shrink)

Agich and Siemionov are to be congratulated for their attempt to refocus the debate on facial transplantation on those with most to gain: individuals with severe facial disfigurement.1 They make a good case for the surgical benefits offered by what they term facial allograft transplantation . Moreover, they fare better than other teams in recognising that candidates for FAT might also have much to lose. The team in Louisville had little to say on this issue, writing only rather benignly of (...) the possible “loss of transplanted tissue”.2 In contrast, Agich and Siemionov squarely confront this risk and offer the most complete account to date of how the risk will be minimised and rejection dealt with. This is an important development, which can only enhance the discussions that, contrary to what these authors imply, must indeed continue.According to Agich and Siemionov, their paper also provides a counterbalance to the numerous more sceptical views being expressed in bioethical and media circles—views which are said to rely more on fiction than fact. In response, we wish to argue that, as persuasive as some of their arguments undoubtedly are, the authors will not succeed in stalling this debate for there remain numerous issues that require further attention. We start with a central component of the authors’ argument, their appeal to “clinical need”, and suggest that this is not straightforwardly identifiable. No more straightforward is their suggestion that metaphors and lessons from the creative world have no place in this debate. This seems particularly unlikely when we consider that FAT will not offer the “ideal” solution; perhaps, then, wholesale facial transplantation is or will become the ideal and a film like Face/Off can offer some insights. Finally, we query the role and influence of …. (shrink)

Engaging in environmental stewardship is critical for sustainability. Understanding individual differences and engagement is an important gap in present scholarship and addressing it is necessary to understand individual factors that relate to the types of activities engaged in, motivations and barriers to environmental stewardship. We surveyed 637 Canadian and American adults via Amazon Mechanical Turk, querying a range of demographic, psychological and environmental perceptions factors as well as motivations and barriers to stewardship activities. Respondents were ultimately grouped into Non-Stewards, Home-Oriented (...) Stewards and Community-Oriented Stewards. Few differences were found among these groups. However, Home-Oriented Stewards and Community-Oriented Stewards exhibited very different initial and ongoing motivations to engage in environmental stewardship. Accordingly, we identify stewardship motivations as a potential leverage point and as one of several promising avenues for future research related to enhancing engagement in environmental stewardship for the sustainability of the planet. (shrink)

In recent years, cross-national collaboration in medical research has gained increased policy attention. Policies are developed to enhance data sharing, ensure open-access, and harmonize international standards and ethics rules in order to promote access to existing resources and increase scientific output. In tandem with this promotion of data sharing, numerous ethics policies are developed to control data flows and protect privacy and confidentiality. Both sets of policy making, however, pay limited attention to the moral decisions and social ties enacted in (...) the everyday routines of scientific work. This paper takes its point of departure in the practices of a Danish laboratory with great experience in international collaboration regarding genetic research. We focus on a simple query, what makes genetic material and health data flow, and which hopes and concerns travel along with them? We explore what we call the flows, the nonflows, and the overflows of material and information, and we document the work producing the flows of health data and biomaterial. We call this work “ethics work” and argue that it is crucial for data sharing though it is rarely articulated in ethics policies, remains inadequately funded, and lacks acknowledgment in policies promoting international data sharing. (shrink)

As engineering applications require management of ever larger volumes of data, ontologies offer the potential to capture, manage, and augment data with the capability for automated reasoning and semantic querying. Unfortunately, considerable barriers hinder wider deployment of ontologies in engineering. Key among these is lack of a shared top-level ontology to unify and organise disparate aspects of the field and coordinate co-development of orthogonal ontologies. As a result, many engineering ontologies are limited to their scope, and functionally difficult to extend (...) or interoperate with other engineering ontologies. This paper demonstrates how the use of a top-level ontology, specifically the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), greatly facilitates interoperability of multiple engineering-related ontologies. We constructed a system of formal linked ontologies by re-engineering legacy ontologies to be conformant with BFO and developing new BFO-conformant ontologies to capture knowledge in the engineering design, enterprise, human factors, manufacturing, and application domain of additive manufacturing. The resulting Integrated Framework for Additively Manufactured Products (IFAMP), including the body knowledge instantiated on its basis, serve as the basis for a proposed Design with Additive Manufacturing Method (DWAM), which we believe can support the design of innovative products with semantically enhanced ideation tools and enhanced access to application domain knowledge. The method and its facilitation through the ontological framework are demonstrated using a case study in medicine. (shrink)

According to the World Health Organisation, three to five million individuals are infected by influenza, and around 250,000 to 500,000 people die of this infectious disease worldwide. Influenza epidemics pose a serious public health threat. Moreover, graver dangers are encountered with influenza subtypes against which there is little or no preexisting human immunity. Such subtypes of influenza have the potential to cause devastating epidemics. Thus, enhancing surveillance systems for the purpose of detecting influenza epidemics in an early stage can quicken (...) response times and save millions of lives. This paper presents three adapting intelligence models: support vector machine regression, artificial neural network using particle swarm optimisation, and our intelligent time series to predict influenza epidemics. The novelty of the current study is that it proposes a new intelligent model to predict influenza outbreaks. The INTS model combines clustering with a time series model to enhance the prediction of influenza outbreaks. The innovation of our proposed model integrates the results obtained from the existing weighted exponential smoothing model with centroids obtained from clustering. We developed a surveillance system for influenza epidemics using Google search queries. The current research is based on a weighted version of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention influenza-like illness activity level obtained from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention data, as well as query data obtained from the Goggle search engine in the USA. The influenza-like illness data was collected from January 4, 2009, to December 27, 2015, stretching across a total time span of 312 weeks. Google Correlate was used to select search queries related to influenza epidemics. In total, 100 search queries were obtained from Google Correlate, 10 of which were better and more relevant search queries selected in this study. The model was evaluated using online Google search queries collected from Google Correlate. Standard measure performance MSE, RMSE, and MAE were employed to estimate the results of the proposed model. The empirical results of the INTS model showed MSE = 0.003, RMSE = 0.036, and MAE = 0.0185, indicating that the errors of the proposed model are very limited. A comparative model of predicting results between the INTS model, alternative Google Flu Trend, and autoregression with Google search data is also presented. The proposed model outperformed the existing models. (shrink)

Digital participatory media offer urban social studies teachers a unique opportunity to foster students' civic skills and public voice while enhancing their understanding of social justice within a democratic society. This article addresses the continuation of a New York City 8th grade U.S. history teacher's journey to use digital tools to foster his students' collaborative and communication skills and to help them learn social justice oriented content. While doing so, he overcame challenges related to technology integration, curricular alignment, selection of (...) appropriate digital tools, and the need to cultivate his students' online academic norms. In doing so, he confronted Livingston's query about whether the use of technology necessitates a “fundamental transformation in learning infrastructure” and the need “to rethink the relations between pedagogy and society, teacher and pupil, and knowledge and participation”. He ended this part of his journey with these new challenges: how to enable his students to become navigators of their learning; ways to align the curriculum with his students' thinking; and, managing a dynamic instructional support system guided by his students' learning. His goal is “to forge a bridge between [his students'] media production and civic engagement'. (shrink)

BackgroundInstitutional review boards (IRBs) have been criticised for delays in approvals for research proposals due to inadequate or inexperienced IRB staff. Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), has significant potential to assist IRB members in a prompt and efficient reviewing process.MethodsFour LLMs were evaluated on whether they could identify potential ethical issues in seven validated case studies. The LLMs were prompted with queries related to the proposed eligibility criteria of the study participants, vulnerability issues, information to be disclosed (...) in the informed consent document (ICD), risk–benefit assessment and justification of the use of a placebo. Another query was issued to the LLMs to generate ICDs for these case scenarios.ResultsAll four LLMs were able to provide answers to the queries related to all seven cases. In general, the responses were homogeneous with respect to most elements. LLMs performed suboptimally in identifying the suitability of the placebo arm, risk mitigation strategies and potential risks to study participants in certain case studies with a single prompt. However, multiple prompts led to better outputs in all of these domains. Each of the LLMs included all of the fundamental elements of the ICD for all case scenarios. Use of jargon, understatement of benefits and failure to state potential risks were the key observations in the AI-generated ICD.ConclusionIt is likely that LLMs can enhance the identification of potential ethical issues in clinical research, and they can be used as an adjunct tool to prescreen research proposals and enhance the efficiency of an IRB. (shrink)

Recent advances in biomedical technology and therapeutic procedures hace generatad a moral crisis in modern medicine. The cast strides made in medical science and technology have creatred options which only a few decades earlier would have been relegated to the realm of science fiction. Man, to a significant degree, now has the ability to exercise control not only over the stages of disease but even over the very processes of life and death, With the unfolding of new discoveries and techniques, (...) the sceintific an dintellectual communities have developed a keen awareness of the ethical issues which arise out of man's enhanced ability to control his destiny. In response to the concern over questions of this nature, there has emerged the rapidly developing field of bioethics. Jews, to whomall such questions are quests not only for applicable humanitarian principles but for Divine guidance, must, of necessity, seek answers in the teachings of the Torah . "The Torah of God is Perfect" ( Psalms 19:8), and in its teachings the discernign student will find eternally-valid answers to even newly-formulated queries. As Physicians and patients turn to Rabbinic authorities for answers, Jewish scholars seen to elucidate and expound the teachings of the torah in these vital areas of concern. The present essay hgihlights some of the ethical issues faced by the Jewish physician who faithfully observes his tradition in all matters including his daily practise of medicin. Although more questions are raised than answered, the aim of this essay will have been achieved if the reader is stimulates to pursue these issues in the extensive writings on the subject now available in English CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this? (shrink)

The purpose of this work is to find out how different library classification systems and linguistic ontologies arrange a particular domain of interest and what are the limitations for information retrieval. We use knowledge representation techniques and languages for construction of a domain specific ontology. This ontology would help not only in problem solving, but it would demonstrate the ease with which complex queries can be handled using principles of domain ontology, thereby facilitating better information retrieval. Facet-based methodology has been (...) used for ontology formalization for quite some time. Ontology formalization involves different steps such as, Identification of the terminology, Analysis, Synthesis, Standardization and Ordering. Firstly, for purposes of conceptualization OntoUML has been used which is a well-founded and established language for Ontology driven Conceptual Modelling. Phase transformation of “the same mode” has been subsequently obtained by OWL-DL using Protégé software. The final OWL ontology contains a total of around 232 axioms. These axioms comprise 148 logical axioms, 76 declaration axioms and 43 classes. These axioms glue together classes, properties and data types as well as a constraint. Such data clustering cannot be achieved through general use of simple classification schemes. Hence it has been observed and established that domain ontology using faceted principles provide better information retrieval with enhanced precision. This ontology should be seen not only as an alternative of the existing classification system but as a Knowledge Base system which can handle complex queries well, which is the ultimate purpose of any classification system or indexing system. In this paper, we try to understand how ontology-based information retrieval systems can prove its utility as a useful tool in the field of library science with a particular focus on the education domain. (shrink)

Governments around the world are implementing electronic government. Today governments at all levels reply to millions of citizen queries electronically. Electronic-government promises accurate, agile, transactions and delivery of services and information to businesses, citizens and governments agencies. More, e-government plays a part towards the enhancement of democracy. Beyond doubt businesses continue to interact electronically with other businesses and their clients because they have to do so, in order to be efficient. E-government utilizes information technology to provide all the access (...) to a wide range of public services. This paper puts forward some steps for a better implementation of electronic government. The paper disputes that several key success factors are appropriate for e-government implementation. (shrink)

Colleges and universities are in an important position to train builders and successors of the socialist cause whilst promoting quality education. Mental health education is an important foundation and condition for comprehensively improving students' overall quality. This research explores adjustment methods for college students' mental health based on virtual reality under the background of positive psychology. It discusses the importance of system requirements analysis in the software development process, analyzes the system's functional requirements, safety requirements, and software and hardware requirements, (...) and uses the Apriori algorithm to explore the influencing factors of college students' mental health. Based on the system engineering method and using the data mining clustering method undertake detailed analysis and research on the mental health of college students, it then designs an anomaly mining algorithm based on clustering to quickly find anomalous data health problems. The interface design of the system is concise and the operation is simple. Users can conveniently input, query, and count information according to the various controls on the interface, which fully embodies human-oriented characteristics. Exploration of the characteristics of students' frequent Internet access ensures the efficiency, accuracy, and comprehensiveness of the evaluation and consultation work, facilitating psychological counseling for teachers and students, and saving paper. By establishing a data mining model, mining the database, and learning about different student groups and their respective characteristics, we discuss our research on student psychology and summarize the mental health status and gender, adaptation and anxiety, introversion, emotionality, and calmness of college students. We also consider the relationship between sex, negative, and courage. Using positive psychology theory, we examine the positive experiences of students and interconnected qualities, to build a mental health practice system. In the experiment, the happiness index evaluation of the virtual reality treatment system group was significant, P = 0.002 < 0.05. Mental health education plays an important role in cultivating the healthy psychology of college students, developing their psychological potential, enhancing their adaptability, and improving their personality. This analysis based on actual data provides a reliable basis for psychological educators to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of school psychological counseling and to facilitate schools in establishing new methods of early prevention and intervention for psychological disorders, enabling institutions to create a healthy atmosphere for college students. (shrink)

There are properties of finite structures that are expressible with the use of Hilbert's ε-operator in a manner that does not depend on the actual interpretation for ε-terms, but not expressible in plain first-order. This observation strengthens a corresponding result of Gurevich, concerning the invariant use of an auxiliary ordering in first-order logic over finite structures. The present result also implies that certain non-deterministic choice constructs, which have been considered in database theory, properly enhance the expressive power of first-order logic (...) even as far as deterministic queries are concerned, thereby answering a question raised by Abiteboul and Vianu. (shrink)

With its probative force drawn solely from premises accessible to the human mind's own inherent powers, Christian philosophy probes the divinely re- vealed truths under their naturally knowable aspects. From the apologetic or defensive angle, this type of philosophy is needed to meet rational queries- one's own or those of others-arising from religious doctrines, for instance from the tenets of creation, divine providence, immortality of the spiritual soul, or human destiny. On the positive side, Christian philosophy deepens the attraction of (...) revealed doctrines in a way comparable to the enhancement given them by architecture, music, art and poetry in actual Christian life. (shrink)

Listed buildings, even if they are not top landmarks, are increasingly attracting visitors. People express interest in hidden gems in their neighborhood or along their travel itinerary, and in the history of the building they live in. All required data has been meticulously collected by the offices for historical monuments but is not flexibly accessible. In Bremen, the database of buildings (with location, map of the estate, construction history, architect, photos) is searchable and browsable online3, but that only helps users (...) who know how to use a rigidly structured database search form. Our beginning BauDenkMalNetz effort (“listed building web”) aims at a wider purpose: modeling the semantic structure of these data, starting in Bremen but open for other data, and exposing them via a semantic web interface with enhanced querying and presentation capabilities. Requirements beyond interactive browsing comprise auto-generation of customized printed guides (e. g. “Bauhaus villas in my neighborhood”), on-demand presentation on mobile devices (e. g. “medieval churches along my travel itinerary”), and serving linked data for usage by other services. (shrink)

The core objective of this article is to advocate for the cultivation of philosophical thinking, a pivotal element that fosters a profound understanding of the evolutionary trajectory of the information society and the human role within this paradigm. An examination of the unique attributes of the information-communicative educational space, coupled with the tenets of post-classical knowledge, underscores the imperative for nurturing human capabilities and personality traits essential for efficacious self-identification within the information society. The anthropological nature of philosophy focuses on (...) understanding that rational, abstract-universal, theoretical thinking is fundamentally value-laden, not free from human interests. These interests determine the directions of scientific research and, if necessary, limit freedom of choice. The philosophical perception of communication, seen as a wellspring of new knowledge generation aimed at pragmatic problem-solving and emerging from human solidarity, promotes the cultivation of creativity, an intrinsic quality of the persona. A favorable factor for the successful development of dialogical thinking is the transformation of the previously dominant written culture into an oral one, where natural spoken language plays an increasingly important role. The exigency for a high degree of personal individualization and thought individualization, prerequisites for successful self-identification, calls for the fostering of stereoscopic and pluralistic thinking. Such thinking, inherent to the philosophical discourse, inherently possesses an authorial essence and proffers diverse interpretative responses to identical queries, thereby catalyzing the development of contextual thinking adept at unraveling the meaning of events in situational contexts. Globalization, accompanied by an increase in the world’s diversity, contributes to the development of global thinking – the ability to solve local problems considering global patterns. As a counterbalance to informational pluralism, the visual turn emerges, epitomized by the capacity to encapsulate voluminous data into intricate montaged images and to adeptly interpret such constructs. This paradigm shift necessitates the enhancement of visual thinking, which, as contemporary philosophy posits, is oriented toward assimilating social experience, laying the groundwork for self-identification. The presented arguments substantiate the conviction that the development of philosophical thinking in the educational process is not an auxiliary factor, but an imperative of the modern information society. (shrink)

Developing countries are endeavoring to advance into the 21st century information age. Their progress, however, is hamstrung by the dire lack of trained, skilled and knowledgeable IS workers who are able to interact with online and off‐line information sources. These countries can tap from the rich intellectual capital lying dormant within the ranks of disabled people to boost the pool of IS workers in their societies. However, before developing countries can draw on the information systems capabilities of disabled workers, these (...) workers themselves must be able to function at par with their able‐bodied counterparts as information workers. This presupposes the availability of special‐purpose information systems devices and approaches developed for disabled users. In this paper, therefore, we examine several issues that are pertinent to IS and disabled people in developing countries, and propose an integrated infrastructure to enhance the interaction of disabled people with on‐line information sources. The study includes issues related to the suitability of different interaction methodologies and technologies for people with disabilities. Additionally, we propose the design of customized interfaces that can be used by disabled people to develop Web‐based database applications and to access and query on‐line databases. (shrink)

Abstract Galileo Then and Now (Draft of paper to be discussed at the Conference, HPD1, to be held at the Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, 11-14 October 2007) William R. Shea, University of Padua The aim of this paper is to stimulate discussion on how shifts in philosophical fashion and societal moods tell us not only what to read but how to go about it, and how history and philosophy of science can jointly deepen our grasp of (...) the issues at stake. The first part highlights some of the things that have occurred in the field of Galileo studies between the monumental edition of Galileo Opere in twenty volumes, edited by Antonio Favaro between 1890 and 1909, and the new enlarged edition that will be published from 2009 onwards by a team of scholars working under Paolo Galluzzi. Part One. From Favaro to Galluzzi "Publish or perish" is an injunction that resonated as clearly in the ears of assistant professors at the end of the 19th century as it does in the first decade of the 21st. But publishing can also mean perishing when what is being edited is the work of an eminent scientist of the past. It simply does not do to offer material that is not what readers expect even if it was written by someone as famous as Galileo, and well authenticated sources were sometimes disregarded when they appeared to be of no interest. It is largely for this reason that a new national edition of Galileo's works is required. Of course, over the last hundred years, a number of letters from and to Galileo as well as a few laudatory or damning comments about his personality or his work have been uncovered, but this would not have been enough to drum up financial and scholarly support for a major editorial project. But the interesting material is Favaro had left out. Before mentioning what this material is, allow me a disclaimer. I'm not focusing on Favaro because he is a singularity, but because he illustrates how a conscientious historian can ride slipshod over evidence because of a philosophical commitment that he is only vaguely aware of, in this case naïve positivism. So what did Favaro to leave out? The answer is large chunks of three collections of manuscript notes that are bound in some of the 347 volumes of the Galilean material in the National Library in Florence. The first of these collections deals with logical treatises and related essays on Aristotelian philosophy, the second with Galileo's laboratory notes on the experiments that he carried out on the pendulum and inclined planes; and the third with astrological computations. Favaro rejected the first collection because they were "pre-Galilean" and hence could only have been trite scholastic exercises that "poor" young Galileo had to undergo in high school. He neglected the second because he had trouble making sense of them The third, astrological collection, he set aside with more trepidation since Galileo cast horoscopes for himself (at least twice), his children and his friends. But the fact that they were also, epistemologically speaking, "pre-Galilean", was enough to cast them into the outer darkness (in this case a dimly lit corridor of the National Library in Florence). The Aristotelian notes that Favaro had neglected were made available by William Wallace, who showed that Galileo culled long passages from professors at the Roman College. Galileo attacked several of Aristotle's ideas, but he never queried Aristotle's scientific realism–namely, the view that there is a uniquely true physical theory, discovered by human powers of reason and observation, and that alternative theories are consequently falls. Wallace made this the basis of his claim that Galileo created, in the heaven above and here on earth, a new science of motion by following the Aristotelian cannons laid down in the Posterior Analytics. On this view, Galileo used Aristotle's logic to subvert Aristotelian physics. It is interesting to contrast Wallace's thesis with that of philosophers of different allegiance, who offer a reconstruction of Galileo's methodology along lines that are much more modern and in which the epistemological core is no longer Aristotelian logic, but common sense instrumentalism. This is not to deny that experiments sometimes speak with a forked tongue, but to stress that methodological rules have also been known to be no more than clashing cymbals. Recent writers have also stressed that Galileo aimed his arguments at a specific audience, and that we must take cognizance of the values and whims of the society in which he operated. The sociology of science can help us understand the background against which Galileo's arguments were assessed and the reasons why he favored some rhetorical strategies over other ones. Mario Biagoli's Galileo Courtier sheds light on the Tuscan court and the Roman famiglia (as the popes styled their entourage), where Galileo found many of his readers and most of his critics. But Galileo was much more than a courtier, and I shall argue that we should use our enhanced knowledge of Galileo's education, his language, his style, and his emoluments to understand his science, not to supplant it. History and philosophy of science can combine their insights to achieve a more critical and balanced view of what actually occurred and why. (shrink)

This paper discusses criticisms of survey research in business ethics as conceptually naive and methodologically unsound. A query is raised about the neglect of case-study methods by business ethics researchers — probably for prudential and ideological reasons. It is argued that the case-study approach is more appropriate to inquiries into the complex, diverse contents and contexts of business ethics. Investigatory case study in particular can do much to rectify the inadequacies of the prevailing positivist paradigm by evolving grounded theoretical (...) questions for further research. Case study offers an alternative to the measurement of ethical behaviour, i.e., naturalistic generalisation which is rooted in the context of organisational cultures and economic systems. It results in enhanced conceptual understanding of the interaction between ethical beliefs of individuals and corporate and market pressures on business decision-taking. (shrink)

In recent years an increasing quantity of UK legislation has introduced blended or ‘hybridised’ procedures that blur the previously clear demarcation between civil and criminal legal processes, typically on the grounds of normatively-motivated political expediency. This paper provides a critical perspective on instances of procedural hybridisation in order to illustrate that, first, the reliance upon civil law measures to remedy criminal law infractions can raise human rights issues and, second, that such instrumental criminal justice strategies deliberately circumvent the enhanced procedural (...) protections of the criminal law. By conceptualising the rule of law as a structural coupling between the political and legal systems, and due process rights as necessary and self-imposed limitations upon systemic operations, this paper employs a systems-theoretical approach to critique this balancing act between expediency and principle, and queries the circumstances under which legislation contravening the rule of law can be said to lack legitimacy. (shrink)

We argue that a conflict between two conceptions of “quantity of matter” employed in a corollary to proposition 6 of Book III of the Principia illustrates a deeper conflict between Newton’s view of the nature of extended bodies and the concept of mass appropriate for the theoretical framework of the Principia. We trace Newton’s failure to recognize the conflict to the fact that he allowed for the justification of natural philosophical claims by two types of a posteriori, empiricist methodologies. Newton's (...) thoughts on these methodologies demonstrate that his natural philosophy continued to develop after the publication of the first edition of Principia and that De Grav should be understood as an early, and not necessarily representative, text. (shrink)

Nicholas Agar, Jeff McMahan and Allen Buchanan have all expressed concerns about enhancing humans far outside the species-typical range. They argue radically enhanced beings will be entitled to greater and more beneficial treatment through an enhanced moral status, or a stronger claim to basic rights. I challenge these claims by first arguing that emerging technologies will likely give the enhanced direct control over their mental states. The lack of control we currently exhibit over our mental lives greatly contributes to our (...) sense of vulnerability. I then argue moral status should be viewed in terms of vulnerability. The enhanced will slowly gain the ability to command their mental states, reducing their vulnerability. These radically enhanced beings will have greater capacities, and possibly an inner life more valuable than our own. They will also be less vulnerable, and as a result, their moral status will be subordinate to our own. (shrink)

The notion of a “query” occurred in legal, medical, theological and scientific writings during the early modern period. Whereas the “questionary” (from c. 1400s) sought replies from within a doctrine (such as Galenic medicine), in the 1600s the query posed open-ended inquiries, seeking empirical information from travellers, explorers and others. During the 1660s in Britain, three versions of the query (and lists of queries) emerged. Distinctions need to be made between queries seeking information via observation and those (...) asking for experimentation, and between those aiming to keep theory to one side and those that framed theoretical conjectures. My examples are drawn from the work of the Royal Society of London (founded 1660) and from some of its leading members, especially Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton. (shrink)

In this essay, I attempt to provide answers to the following four queries concerning the metaphysics of early human embryogenesis. (1) Following its first cellular fission, is it coherent to claim that one and only one of two “blastomeric” twins of a human zygote is identical with that zygote? (2) Following the fusion of two human pre-embryos, is it coherent to claim that one and only one pre-fusion pre-embryo is identical with that postfusion pre-embryo? (3) Does a live human being (...) come into existence only when its brain comes into existence? (4) At implantation, does a pre-embryo become a mere part of its mother? I argue that either if things have quidditative properties or if criterialism is false, then queries (1) and (2) can be answered in the affirmative; that in light of recent developments in theories of human death and in light of a more “functional” theory of brains, query (3) can be answered in the negative; and that plausible mereological principles require a negative answer to query (4). (shrink)

Large databases of linguistic annotations are used for testing linguistic hypotheses and for training language processing models. These linguistic annotations are often syntactic or prosodic in nature, and have a hierarchical structure. Query languages are used to select particular structures of interest, or to project out large slices of a corpus for external analysis. Existing languages suffer from a variety of problems in the areas of expressiveness, efficiency, and naturalness for linguistic query. We describe the domain of linguistic (...) trees and discuss the expressive requirements for a query language. Then we present a language that can express a wide range of queries over these trees, and show that the language is first-order complete over trees. (shrink)

Robert Brandom’s normative-pragmatic theory is intended to represent the minimal set of practical abilities whose exhibition qualifies creatures as speaking a language. His model of a minimally discursive practice (MDP) is one in which participants, devoid of logical vocabulary, are only capable of making assertions and drawing inferences. This paper argues that Brandom’s purely assertional practices are not MDPs and that speech acts of asking questions (queries) must be included in any practice that counts as an MDP. The upshot of (...) the argument is support for the claim that the normative pragmatic analysis of assertions requires a corresponding analysis of queries and vice versa. (shrink)

This work concerns itself with characterising the different types of contents that arise from uses of interrogative sentences, describing what meanings get associated with particular interrogative sentences, and explaining how these get put together compositionally on the basis of the meaning of their constituents, with particular attention to the meaning of interrogative phrases. ;Within most recent work in linguistic semantics, questions, the contents of query uses of interrogatives, have been analysed reductively as higher order propositional objects. The current work (...) argues against such an analysis. In its stead a view of questions is offered wherein these constitute the subclass of singular propositional entities, unresolved states-of-affairs , those that contain one or more argument roles of the propositional entity with whom no entity is associated. This view provides for an inherently richer notion of answerhood that is at the same time based on entities that are more plausibly available to cognitive agents engaged in querying. The need for a richer notion of answerhood is prompted by our demonstration that the class of answers to any given question--contents that can be conveyed by acceptable responses--has been considerably under-recognized in past work. An important gain made by the proposed approach is that it reveals and provides a simple account of systematic and cross-linguistically stable contrasts in the ability of a predicate to take an interrogative meaning as an argument. ;Our proposal for characterising the meaning of interrogative expressions argues that there exist three independent classes of uses which interrogative phrases can undergo, which we dub independent, dependent, and reprise uses. We argue extensively against an assumption common to most past work that interrogatives should be viewed as quantifiers on either syntactic or semantic grounds. We propose that dependent and reprise uses of interrogative expressions are each particular instances of use-types applicable to non-interrogative expressions. Dependent uses include bound variable anaphora as an instance. Reprise uses comprehend quotative uses of declarative sentences. We show how combining the general characteristics of each use type with the characterisation of independent interrogative uses we provide enables the defining conditions pertaining to these additional interrogative uses to be derived. This allows for a simple and comprehensive account of the available interrogative meanings. (shrink)

LetA be any nonrecursive set. We define a hierarchy of sets (and a corresponding hierarchy of degrees) that are reducible toA based on bounding the number of queries toA that an oracle machine can make. WhenA is the halting problemK our hierarchy of sets interleaves with the difference hierarchy on the r.e. sets in a logarithmic way; this follows from a tradeoff between the number of parallel queries and the number of serial queries needed to compute a function with oracleK.

As scientific progress approaches the point where significant human enhancements could become reality, debates arise whether such technologies should be made available. This paper evaluates the widespread concern that human enhancements will inevitably accentuate existing inequality and analyzes whether prohibition is the optimal public policy to avoid this outcome. Beyond these empirical questions, this paper considers whether the inequality objection is a sound argument against the set of enhancements most threatening to equality, i.e., cognitive enhancements. In doing so, I shall (...) argue that cognitive enhancements can be embraced wholeheartedly, for three separate reasons. However, though the inequality objection does not sufficiently support the conclusion that cognitive enhancements should be prohibited, it raises several concerns for optimal policy design that shall be addressed here. (shrink)