دانلود کتاب منشورهای هستی‌شناختی -مهندسی دانش برای سیستم‌های عامل سازمانی

Ontologies are knowledge commitments. As commitments, they must rely on some agreed-upon symbolic representation. When addressing knowledge, ontologies can focus on specific domains or aim at fundamental entities. Both specific and fundamental approaches are based on the assumption that inherent truths can be universally agreed upon. At first, this undertaking may seem both legitimate and realistic, until allegedly fundamental entities and actual things must be reconciled. Then facts turn rebellious and make their point: truth is a matter of faith, and whatever ontologists and believers may think, faiths are, by nature, singular. On that account, this book adopts a pragmatic Cartesian approach governed by doubt. Instead of pursuing ontological rainbows, it introduces an ontological framework that allows for cognizant mappings of territories and provides a reliable compass to navigate the galaxies of facts, concepts, and categories. More critically, ontological prisms allow for the ecumenical engineering of knowledge and can serve as blueprints for agentic cognition. Ontological prisms are framed by philosophical, cognitive, and functional perspectives. From a philosophical perspective, along with the Cartesian agnosticism mentioned above, ontological prisms borrow a few tenets from Ludwig Wittgenstein. First, they are not so much about ontologies as about an ecumenical framework that could support the development of possible ontologies. Then, distancing itself from existential-phenomenological and analytical traditions, the focus is shifted from things and beings to facts, with an explicit distinction between knowledge and the formal and semantic capabilities of languages. Finally, categories are crossed with facts and concepts in order to address reasoning and engineering concerns. From a cognitive perspective, ontological prisms are defined by their opposition to the tenets of disembodied minds and the correspondence theory of truth. That’s because assuming that minds produce concepts independently of their biological reality would a priori deny any relationship between connectionist and symbolic cognition. Likewise, ontological prisms allow no room for an inherent correspondence between the names of concepts and their essence. Concepts, whether as mental images or symbolic artifacts, are human cultural products, and there is no reason to assume any kind of inherent attachment between symbols and concepts. Hence, the collective perspective is adopted by this book regarding cognition and knowledge. From a functional perspective, the objective is to describe an ecumenical approach to the engineering of knowledge as defined by Davis, Shrobe, and Szolovits in their seminal paper (see bibliography): 1. Surrogates: manage the symbolic counterparts of objects, events and relationships identified in context and pertaining to concerns. 2. Ontological commitments: maintain a set of consistent statements about the categories of things that may exist in the domains under consideration. 3. Fragmentary theory of intelligent reasoning: supports actionable representations of what the things can do or can be done with. 4. Medium for efficient computation: make knowledge understandable by computers and support smooth learning curves. 5. Medium for human expression: improves the communication between specific domain experts and generic knowledge managers. The book is organized into three parts. The first part presents the theoretical foundations of ontological prisms (Chapter 1), their three-pronged architecture (Chapter 2), interoperability (Chapter 3), and their integration within organizations (Chapter 4). The second part takes a functional perspective and focuses on the major cognitive capabilities of ontological prisms: language (Chapter 5), reasoning (Chapter 6), and decision-making (Chapter 7). The third part considers the benefits of ontological prisms in relation to systems (Chapter 8) and knowledge (Chapter 9) engineering. Chapter 10 introduces an OWL kernel that implements ontological prisms using the Protégé online platform. Finally, two cautionary remarks. First, in line with its agnostic and ecumenical objectives, this book will not aim for universal definitions but will instead opt for clear and unambiguous ones that can be used effectively, consistently, and comprehensively. Then, readers must be aware that the engineering of knowledge is not a kindergarten activity, as its raison d’être is to address the complexity of uncharted territories.