Representing Concepts in Formal Ontologies: Compositionality vs. Typicality Effects

• Authors: Marcello Frixione , Antonio Lieto
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The problem of concept representation is relevant for many sub- fields of cognitive research, including psychology and philosophy, as well as artificial intelligence. In particular, in recent years it has received a great deal of attention within the field of knowledge representation, due to its relevance for both knowledge engineering as well as ontology-based tech- nologies. However, the notion of a concept itself turns out to be highly disputed and problematic. In our opinion, one of the causes of this state of affairs is that the notion of a concept is, to some extent, heterogeneous, and encompasses different cognitive phenomena. This results in a strain be- tween conflicting requirements, such as compositionality, on the one hand and the need to represent prototypical information on the other. In some ways artificial intelligence research shows traces of this situation. In this paper, we propose an analysis of this current state of affairs. Since it is our opinion that a mature methodology with which to approach knowledge representation and knowledge engineering should also take advantage of the empirical results of cognitive psychology concerning human abilities, we outline some proposals for concept representation in formal ontologies, which take into account suggestions from psychological research. Our basic assumption is that knowledge representation systems whose design takes into account evidence from experimental psychology (and which, therefore, are more similar to the human way of organizing and processing informa- tion) may therefore give better results in many applications (e.g. in the fields of information retrieval and semantic web).

Keywords

EN

concept representation; formal ontologies; prototypical effects; compositionality

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń)
• Journal: Logic and Logical Philosophy
• Year: 2012
• Volume: 21
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 391-414

Dates

published

2012-12-01

online

2013-07-02

Contributors

author

Marcello Frixione

• DAFIST University of Genova, Italy

author

Antonio Lieto

• Department of Computer Science University of Turin, Italy

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Identifiers

DOI

10.12775/LLP.2012.018