European-Japanese Ontology Interaction

Marie Curie IRSES Exchange Project n. 247503

[private]


European Partners: Japanese Partner:
Period
24 Months

Starting month
March 2010


Funding Agency
European Commission


Description:
The EuJoint exchange programme aims to develop four topics related to foundational ontology and applications to engineering with particular emphasis on engineering design. The goal is to study and organize philosophical views into suitable formal systems (ontological systems or knowledge structures) for semantic integration. Ontology focuses on the study of the essential elements that allow to define general or domain dependent notions. EuJoint is interested in a set of notions needed for the conceptual organization of fairly general domains so that it would be possible to rely on these to build robust and interoperable frameworks for automatic management of information content. EuJoint work will be developed in a formal and expressive logical language endowed with clear semantics, namely first-order logic (or suitable fragments/extensions) with its model-theoretic semantics. This choice emphasizes the relevance that semantic transparency has in projects based on foundational ontologies, that is, in knowledge systems that focus on very general and basic concepts like object, event, state and quality, and general relations such as participation, dependence and parthood. The general goal of the EuJoint exchange programme is to foster the adoption of a common terminology and understanding of the domain among the participants; to create important fragments of general ontologies; to investigate ontological and function-based views on technical products. A core activity is the exchange of knowledge on two existing ontologies, namely DOLCE and YATO, their comparison, the discovery of possible improvements in particular on notions related to functionality. Another activity focuses on the concept of role and context when speaking about products since one can see functionality as a role played by a product in some context. By pairing this work with the study of concepts like artefact, device and product, EuJoint aims to a framework for understanding product functionality on the basis of philosophical views.