A comprehensive theory-based approach to the treatment of text meaning in natural language processing applications.

Solipsism indicates an epistemological position that denies the existence of ‘others’ by asserting that the ‘self’ is the only thing that can be known to exist. For sophist philosophers, the belief that “we can not know anything, and even if we do so, we cannot communicate it” is central to this theory. However, until now there has been little academic scholarship that has tried to provide answers to the pressing issues raised by solipsism. In Solipsist Ontology: Physical Things and Personal Perceptual Space, Ural aims to redefine solipsism by analyzing and elaborating on traditional philosophical problems, such as empiricism and rationalism, as well as discussing problems of language, communication, and meaning. Ural reveals where solipsism has been previously ignored, pseudo-problems have arisen that disguise the sources of the problems with prejudices that concern the philosophical problems in question. Notably, many current, as well as traditional problems of ontology, epistemology, and language are bound up in discourses of solipsism. Ural argues that discarding solipsism as a philosophical discourse hinders new interpretations of traditional philosophical thought. This book offers a fresh perspective to solipsism by defining it in relation to concepts such as ‘physical things,’ ‘personal perceptual space’ and ‘identity.’ Importantly, Ural proposes that an understanding of ‘identity’ is not necessary in order to redefine solipsism. By building a logical system that fashions communication and solipsism as interrelated, it is possible to reject ‘identity’ as a useless concept and thus overcome the classic solipsist dilemma of “we are not able to communicate.” This original piece of research is an important and timely contribution to the field of philosophy that will be of great interest to teachers, researchers, and students.

This book explains music’s comprehensive ontology, its way of existence and processing, as specified in its compact characterization: music embodies meaningful communication and mediates physically between its emotional and mental layers. The book unfolds in a basic discourse in everyday language that is accessible to everybody who wants to understand what this topic is about. Musical ontology is delayed in its fundamental dimensions: its realities, its meaningful communication, and its embodied utterance from musical creators to an interested audience. The authors' approach is applicable to every musical genre and is scientific, the book is suitable for non-musicians and non-scientists alike.

Scholars from many different disciplines examine consciousness through the lens of intellectual approaches and cultures ranging from cosmology research and cell biophysics laboratories to pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and Tibetan Tantric Buddhism in a volume that extends consciousness studies beyond the limits of current neuroscience research. The "hard problem" of today's consciousness studies is subjective experience: understanding why some brain processing is accompanied by an experienced inner life. Recent scientific advances offer insights for understanding the physiological and chemical phenomenology of consciousness. But by leaving aside the internal experiential nature of consciousness in favor of mapping neural activity, such science leaves many questions unanswered. In Ontology of Consciousness, scholars from a range of disciplines—from neurophysiology to parapsychology, from mathematics to anthropology and indigenous non-Western modes of thought—go beyond these limits of current neuroscience research to explore insights offered by other intellectual approaches to consciousness. These scholars focus their attention on such philosophical approaches to consciousness as Tibetan Tantric Buddhism, North American Indian insights, pre-Columbian Mesoamerican civilization, and the Byzantine Empire. Some draw on artifacts and ethnographic data to make their point. Others translate cultural concepts of consciousness into modern scientific language using models and mathematical mappings. Many consider individual experiences of sentience and existence, as seen in African communalism, Hindi psychology, Zen Buddhism, Indian vibhuti phenomena, existentialism, philosophical realism, and modern psychiatry. Some reveal current views and conundrums in neurobiology to comprehend sentient intellection. Contributors Karim Akerma, Matthijs Cornelissen, Antoine Courban, Mario Crocco, Christian de Quincey, Thomas B. Fowler, Erlendur Haraldsson, David. J. Hufford, Pavel B. Ivanov, Heinz Kimmerle, Stanley Krippner, Armand J. Labbé, James Maffie, Hubert Markl, Graham Parkes, Michael Polemis, E Richard Sorenson, Mircea Steriade, Thomas Szasz, Mariela Szirko, Robert A.F. Thurman, Edith L.B. Turner, Julia Watkin, Helmut Wautischer

This book covers two applications of ontologies in software engineering and software technology: sharing knowledge of the problem domain and using a common terminology among all stakeholders; and filtering the knowledge when defining models and metamodels. By presenting the advanced use of ontologies in software research and software projects, this book is of benefit to software engineering researchers in both academia and industry.

During the last two decades, the idea of Semantic Web has received a great deal of attention. An extensive body of knowledge has emerged to describe technologies that seek to help us create and use aspects of the Semantic Web. Ontology and agent-based technologies are understood to be the two important technologies here. A large number of articles and a number of books exist to describe the use individually of the two technologies and the design of systems that use each of these technologies individually, but little focus has been given on how one can - sign systems that carryout integrated use of the two different technologies. In this book we describe ontology and agent-based systems individually, and highlight advantages of integration of the two different and complementary te- nologies. We also present a methodology that will guide us in the design of the - tegrated ontology-based multi-agent systems and illustrate this methodology on two use cases from the health and software engineering domain. This book is organized as follows: • Chapter I, Current issues and the need for ontologies and agents, describes existing problems associated with uncontrollable information overload and explains how ontologies and agent-based systems can help address these - sues. • Chapter II, Introduction to multi-agent systems, defines agents and their main characteristics and features including mobility, communications and collaboration between different agents. It also presents different types of agents on the basis of classifications done by different authors.

The volume aims at providing a comprehensive review of the diverse efforts covering the gap existing between the two main perspectives on the topic of ontologies for multi-agent systems, namely: How ontologies should be modelled and represented in order to be effectively used in agent systems, and on the other hand, what kind of capabilities should be exhibited by an agent in order to make use of ontological knowledge and to perform efficient reasoning with it. The volume collects the most significant papers of the AAMAS 2002 and AAMAS 2003 workshop on ontologies for agent systems, and the EKAW 2002 workshop on ontologies for multi-agent systems.