An increasing amount of data is now available from public and private sources. Furthermore, the types, formats, and number of sources of data are also increasing. Techniques for extracting, storing, processing, and analyzing such data have been developed in the last few years for managing this bewildering variety based on a structure called a knowledge graph. Industry has devoted a great deal of effort to the development of knowledge graphs, and knowledge graphs are now critical to the functions of intelligent (...) virtual assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. The goal of the Ontology Summit 2020 was to understand not only what knowledge graphs are but also where they originated, why they are so popular, the current issues, and their future prospects. The summit sessions examined many examples of knowledge graphs and surveyed the relevant standards that exist and are in development for knowledge graphs. The purpose of this Communiqué is to summarize our understanding from the Summit in order to foster research and development of knowledge graphs. (shrink)

Are people at bottom motivated entirely by self-interest? Or do they act only sometimes out of self-interest, and sometimes for other reasons—say, to help out a friend for her own sake, with no expectation of being benefitted in return? Scholars have often thought they could discern in the works of classical Greek thinkers a commitment to psychological egoism, the thesis that one is motivated to act only by considerations of the expected benefits and harms that will accrue to oneself. For (...) instance, a host of influential interpreters have taken Plato to be wedded to psychological egoism throughout his corpus. Often, the commitment is thought to run so deep that Plato rarely, if ever, manages to articulate it explicitly, let alone to examine it critically and defend it. That kind of approach obviously invites challenges, and lately there has been a small but growing resistance to the egoistic interpretation of Plato. The challenges are especially welcome given the general lack of support for psychological egoism in the present intellectual climate: egoistic readings have increasingly seemed to imply a crippling weakness in the Platonic system. (shrink)

In discussing Gail Fine’s contribution, Sharma challenges the idea that the pseudo-Platonic Sisyphus can productively be interpreted using the philosophical devices of Plato’s Meno. Sharma then explores another approach to the Sisyphus, which involves reading the dialogue as an attack on the tendency to assimilate deliberation to theoretical inquiry and, relatedly, as an attempt to call attention to the practical skills that are uniquely involved in deliberation. Sharma ends by speculating that the dialogue was composed by a member of the (...) school of Isocrates and was intended as a criticism of the intellectual orientation of Plato’s Academy. (shrink)

This bold and wide-ranging study aims to revise a common picture of Plato’s thinking about human motivation. Kamtekar identifies the picture as one whereby Plato’s Socrates initially embraces intellectualism because he holds that an agent is motivated only by rational considerations based on her own good, and rejects that standpoint in the Republic with the doctrine of the tripartite soul. Kamtekar argues instead that, for Socrates, “human beings have a natural desire for our own good,” and that this principle is (...) the theoretical basis for both Socratic intellectualism and the tripartite soul.Chapter 1 is methodological and emphasizes the importance of dialogical context. Specifically, it stresses that... (shrink)

Advances in machine learning and the development of very large knowledge graphs have accompanied a proliferation of ontologies of many types and for many purposes. These ontologies are commonly developed independently, and as a result, it can be difficult to communicate about and between them. To address this difficulty of communication, ontologies and the communities they serve must agree on how their respective terminologies and formalizations relate to each other. The process of coming into accord and agreement is called “harmonization.” (...) The Ontology Summit 2021 examined the overall landscape of ontologies, the many kinds of ontology generation and harmonization, as well as the sustainability of ontologies. The Communiqué synthesizes and summarizes the findings of the summit as well as earlier summits on related issues. One of the major impediments to harmonization is the relatively poor quality of natural language definitions in many ontologies. The summit surveyed the state of the art in natural language definition development, based on lexicographic principles, as well as examples of ongoing projects that are explicitly dealing with harmonization and sustainability. (shrink)

ABSTRACT M.M. McCabe argues that in Plato’s Euthydemus, Dionysodorus and Euthydemus hold a view she calls ‘chopped logos’. Chopped logos implies that nothing said is false, or opposed to any other statement, or entailed by any other statement. We focus on a key piece of evidence for chopped logos, the argument concluding that there is no such thing as contradiction, and defend a competing interpretation. The argument in question, and the eristic exchanges as a whole, are simply examples of a (...) dialectical game, a contest that is the verbal equivalent of physical competitions like wrestling or the pankration. The argument has no doctrinal significance and no deep connection with the other arguments of the dialogue. Its interest proves to be broadly methodological rather than doctrinal, a showpiece of eristic display. (shrink)