The Process Specification Language (PSL) has been designed to facilitate correct and complete exchange of process information among manufacturing systems, such as scheduling, process modeling, process planning, production planning, simulation, project management, work flow, and business process reengineering. We given an overview of the theories with the PSL ontology, discuss some of the design principles for the ontology, and finish with examples of process specifications that are based on the ontology.

Many types of part-whole relations have been proposed in the literature to aid the conceptual modeller to choose the most appropriate type, but many of those relations lack a formal specification to give clear and unambiguous semantics to them. To remedy this, a formal taxonomy of types of mereological and meronymic part-whole relations is presented that distinguishes between transitive and intransitive relations and the kind of entity types that are related. The demand to use it effectively brings afore new requirements (...) for automated reasoning over a hierarchy of relations. To ensure logically and ontologically correct inferencing over both the class and role hierarchy, the new reasoning service RBox compatibility for Description Logics reasoners is introduced. The proposed combination of formal semantics and the new reasoning service will improve the representation of the application domain when using part-whole relations in conceptual models and ontologies. (shrink)

The use of highly abstract mathematical frameworks is essential for building the sort of theoretical foundation for semantic integration needed to bring it to the level of a genuine engineering discipline. At the same time, much of the work that has been done by means of these frameworks assumes a certain amount of background knowledge in mathematics that a lot of people working in ontology, even at a fairly high theoretical level, lack. The major purpose of this short paper is (...) provide a (comparatively) simple model of semantic integration that remains within the friendlier confines of first-order languages and their usual classical semantics and logic. (shrink)

Process modeling is ubiquitous in business and industry. While a great deal of effort has been devoted to the formal and philosophical investigation of processes, surprisingly little research connects this work to real world process modeling. The purpose of this paper is to begin making such a connection. To do so, we first develop a simple mathematical model of activities and their instances based upon the model theory for the NIST Process Specification Language (PSL), a simple language for describing these (...) entities, and a semantics for the latter in terms of the former, and a set of axioms for the semantics based upon the NIST Process Specification Language (PSL). On the basis of this foundation, we then develop a general notion of a process model, and an account of what it is for such a model to be realized by a collection of events. (shrink)

The Knowledge Interchange Format (KIF) [2] is an ASCII- based framework for use in exchanging of declarative knowledge among disparate computer systems. KIF has been widely used in the fields of knowledge engineering and artificial intelligence. Due to its growing importance, there arose a renewed push to make KIF an offi- cial international standard. A central motivation behind KIF standardization is the wide variation in quality, style, and content — of logic-based frameworks being used for knowledge representation. Variations of all (...) three types, of course, hinder the possibility of semantic integration. A well-crafted logic standard for the representation of declarative knowledge would impose some greatly needed syntactic and semantic uniformity on the current somewhat chaotic situation, uniformity that would in turn greatly enhance the capacity for semantic integration. For all its potential advantages, however, the idea of a logic standard is problematic for at least two reasons. (shrink)

Abstract: According to the Veridicality Thesis, information requires truth. On this view, smoke carries information about there being a fire only if there is a fire, the proposition that the earth has two moons carries information about the earth having two moons only if the earth has two moons, and so on. We reject this Veridicality Thesis. We argue that the main notions of information used in cognitive science and computer science allow A to have information about the obtaining of (...) p even when p is false. (shrink)

There is no consensus as to whether a Liar sentence is meaningful or not. Still, a widespread conviction with respect to Liar sentences (and other ungrounded sentences) is that, whether or not they are meaningful, they are useless. The philosophical contribution of this paper is to put this conviction into question. Using the framework of assertoric semantics, which is a semantic valuation method for languages of self-referential truth that has been developed by the author, we show that certain computational problems, (...) called query structures, can be solved more efficiently by an agent who has self-referential resources (amongst which are Liar sentences) than by an agent who has only classical resources; we establish the computational power of self-referential truth. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the implications of the established result for deflationary accounts of truth. (shrink)