The result of more than 15 years of collective research, Multimedia Ontology: Representation and Applications provides a theoretical foundation for understanding the nature of media data and the principles involved in its interpretation. The book presents a unified approach to recent advances in multimedia and explains how a multimedia ontology can

Based on author's thesis from the Dutch Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems.

How human musical experience emerges from the audition of organized tones is a riddle of long standing. In The Musical Representation, Charles Nussbaum offers a philosophical naturalist's solution. Nussbaum founds his naturalistic theory of musical representation on the collusion between the physics of sound and the organization of the human mind-brain. He argues that important varieties of experience afforded by Western tonal art music since 1650 arise through the feeling of tone, the sense of movement in musical space, cognition, emotional arousal, and the engagement, by way of specific emotional responses, of deeply rooted human ideals. Construing the art music of the modern West as representational, as a symbolic system that carries extramusical content, Nussbaum attempts to make normative principles of musical representation explicit and bring them into reflective equilibrium with the intuitions of competent listeners. Nussbaum identifies three modes of musical representation, describes the basis of extramusical meaning, and analyzes musical works as created historical entities (performances of which are tokens or replicas). In addition, he explains how music gives rise to emotions and evokes states of mind that are religious in character. Nussbaum's argument proceeds from biology, psychology, and philosophy to music--and occasionally from music back to biology, psychology, and philosophy. The human mind-brain, writes Nussbaum, is a living record of its evolutionary history; relatively recent cognitive acquisitions derive from older representational functions of which we are hardly aware. Consideration of musical art can help bring to light the more ancient cognitive functions that underlie modern human cognition. The biology, psychology, and philosophy of musical representation, he argues, have something to tell us about what we are, based on what we have been.

In this volume, Rudi Studer and his team deliver a self-contained compendium about the exciting field of Semantic Web services, starting with the basic standards and technologies and also including advanced applications in eGovernment and eHealth. The contributions provide both the theoretical background and the practical knowledge necessary to understand the essential ideas and to design new cutting-edge applications.

Enabling information interoperability, fostering legal knowledge usability and reuse, enhancing legal information search, in short, formalizing the complexity of legal knowledge to enhance legal knowledge management are challenging tasks, for which different solutions and lines of research have been proposed. During the last decade, research and applications based on the use of legal ontologies as a technique to represent legal knowledge has raised a very interesting debate about their capacity and limitations to represent conceptual structures in the legal domain. Making conceptual legal knowledge explicit would support the development of a web of legal knowledge, improve communication, create trust and enable and support open data, e-government and e-democracy activities. Moreover, this explicit knowledge is also relevant to the formalization of software agents and the shaping of virtual institutions and multi-agent systems or environments. This book explores the use of ontologism in legal knowledge representation for semantically-enhanced legal knowledge systems or web-based applications. In it, current methodologies, tools and languages used for ontology development are revised, and the book includes an exhaustive revision of existing ontologies in the legal domain. The development of the Ontology of Professional Judicial Knowledge (OPJK) is presented as a case study.

There is broad agreement in the medieval tradition that we conceive things in the world owing to the transmission of intelligible content through various media that culminates in the concept by which something in the world is cognitively present for us. Yet how the intelligible content is transmitted along with the nature of the ultimate object of cognition provoked ceaseless debate. The first three essays in Universal Representation, and the Ontology of Individuation consider these issues as they play out in the metaphysics and natural philosophy of Avicenna, Averroes, Thomas Aquinas, Ockham and others. The last three essays turn to the metaphysical problem of the nature of the principle of individuation. Moderate realists believe in the existence of immanent general natures such as humanity and equinity, whereby individuals are members of diverse natural kinds. Accordingly, moderate realists such as Aquinas, Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus need to investigate the nature of the individuating principle by which members of one and the same natural kind differ from one another. Nominalists, for their part, need not concern themselves with any principle of individuation as, for them, all reality is individual, there being no immanent universals; but this release comes at the cost of a new set of epistemological problems.

Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist: Effective Modeling in RDFS and OWL, Second Edition, discusses the capabilities of Semantic Web modeling languages, such as RDFS (Resource Description Framework Schema) and OWL (Web Ontology Language). Organized into 16 chapters, the book provides examples to illustrate the use of Semantic Web technologies in solving common modeling problems. It uses the life and works of William Shakespeare to demonstrate some of the most basic capabilities of the Semantic Web. The book first provides an overview of the Semantic Web and aspects of the Web. It then discusses semantic modeling and how it can support the development from chaotic information gathering to one characterized by information sharing, cooperation, and collaboration. It also explains the use of RDF to implement the Semantic Web by allowing information to be distributed over the Web, along with the use of SPARQL to access RDF data. Moreover, the reader is introduced to components that make up a Semantic Web deployment and how they fit together, the concept of inferencing in the Semantic Web, and how RDFS differs from other schema languages. Finally, the book considers the use of SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System) to manage vocabularies by taking advantage of the inferencing structure of RDFS-Plus. This book is intended for the working ontologist who is trying to create a domain model on the Semantic Web. - Updated with the latest developments and advances in Semantic Web technologies for organizing, querying, and processing information, including SPARQL, RDF and RDFS, OWL 2.0, and SKOS - Detailed information on the ontologies used in today's key web applications, including ecommerce, social networking, data mining, using government data, and more - Even more illustrative examples and case studies that demonstrate what semantic technologies are and how they work together to solve real-world problems