This presentation aims to provide a sense of what happens when a bCLEARer project is faced with data in the FORM paradigm (a kind of semi-structured data). It aims to show how the implicit FORM syntax can be made explicit. The presentation walks through a sanitised case history based upon real project, but both simplified and sanitised. This is a sample of actual work, but not intended as an example of best practice – or even good practice. It does, however, show some typical approaches and the challenges faced, particularly at the early alpha stage.

This presentation describes the Top level Ontology (TLO) that is being developed for the Information Management framework (IMF). It starts with a brief outline of how the TLO emerged from the work on the IMF. It notes the initial focus on providing a foundation for Euclidean standards. It touches on the foundation - the core constructional ontology - built from a unified constructor theory with three elements: set, sum and tuple constructors. It then looks at the data components of the TLO and how these are used to build four-dimensional space time: taking in mereotopology, chronology and worldlines.
Presentation Structure:

• Introducing the IMF Team
• Background
  • Information Management Framework
  • Choice-based framework
• TLO Initial Use
• Situating the TLO in the IMF
• Data Section: Core Constructional Ontology
• Data Section: Top Level Ontology

Situating domain ontologies in a general, long-term, diachronic information technology framework helps us to understand better their role in the evolution of information. This perspective provides some innovative insights into how they should be built.

The digitalisation journey that takes us to semantically seamlessly interoperating enterprise systems is (at the later stages - where ontology is deployed) a hard road to travel. This presentation aims to highlight some of the main hurdles people will face on the digitalisation journey using a cultural evolution perspective. From this viewpoint, we highlight the radical new practices that need to be adopted along the journey. The presentation looks at the concerns this evolutionary perspective raises. For example, evolutionary contingency. It seems clear that if we don’t adapt in the right way, we will not evolve interoperability. While we have some idea of what the practices are, what the trajectory of the journey is. This is not enough, the community also needs find the means to (horizontally) inherit these. The presentation then does a quick tour around so of the new practices that need to be adopted.

Overview

• Currently work in a niche area:
  
  • ontologies for operational system semantic interoperability – integration
  • think integrating enterprise SAP and Maximo operationallyhave been working here for a while (since late 1980s)
  • not many (any?) other people working here
• Believe that:
  
  • there are opportunities for architectural (radical and disruptive) innovation in this and other ontology area
  • at this stage, the approach in my area needs to be agile
  • that premature standardisation could stifle the innovation
• Want to suggest that:
  
  • there is a need to balance the conformity (of standards) with the agility needed to produce innovation
  • the balancing involves recognising when to standardise,
  • so, recognising when there is premature standardisation
  • it is not yet time to standardise in my area

This presentation aims to give an overview of how the unification of types could fit into IS.

This presentation looks at why the ‘unification of types’ is pragmatically important (and, more generally, why the ‘innocent’ development environment unification is pragmatically important). It does this by taking an evolutionary perspective that recognises unification as a form adaption for semantic interoperability.

This is a brief introduction to the BORO approach and its two main components; the BORO Foundation and the bCLEARer methodology. The introduction will give an overview of both the history and the nature of the approach. It will finish with a brief look at some current enhancement work on modality and graphs as well as implementations.

We aim to establish that there is at least one role for constructionalism in applied ontology by giving the case history of an early example of a case where the foundations of a top-level ontology are constructionally refactored. What we have called ‘taking the constructional turn’. The example is the BORO foundational ontology which has, over the last decade, been taking this turn. The paper starts by providing an evolutionary context for the case history. It then provides a chronological profile of the constructional turn and the radical enrichment it delivered. This clearly establishes the feasibility and benefits of this specific role for constructionalism in applied ontology.

The paper sketches some initial results from an ongoing project to develop an ontology-based digital form for representing uncertain information. We frame this work as a journey from lower to higher levels of digital maturity across a technology divide. The paper first sets a baseline by describing the basic challenges any project dealing with digital uncertainty faces. It then describes how the project is facing them. It shows firstly how an extensional ontology (such as the BORO Foundational Ontology or the Information Exchange Standard) can be extended with a Lewisian counterpart approach to formalizing uncertainty that is adapted to computing. And then it shows how this is expressive enough to handle the challenges.

Our aim in this paper is to outline how the design space for the ontologization process is richer than current practice would suggest. We point out that engineering processes as well as products need to be designed – and identify some components of the design. We investigate the possibility of designing a range of radically new practices, providing examples of the new practices from our work over the last three decades with an outlier methodology, bCLEARer. We also suggest that setting an evolutionary context for ontologization helps one to better understand the nature of these new practices and provides the conceptual scaffolding that shapes fertile processes. Where this evolutionary perspective positions digitalization (the evolutionary emergence of computing technologies) as the latest step in a long evolutionary trail of information transitions. This reframes ontologization as a strategic tool for leveraging the emerging opportunities offered by digitalization.

This presentation looks at the strategic question: where do we go from here? Where here is a situation where the fidelity of interoperability is too low. It suggests the answer is going to be in developing the ring forms(s).

Presentation Structure:

• BORO situation: setting up the strategic question
• Framing – then leveraging – the challenge
  
  • a human information evolution perspective: a narrow framework
  • a biological information evolution perspective: a wider framework
  • a digital information transmission perspective: visualising interoperability
  • an information evolution population analysis
• Innovation
  
  • innovation and diffusion (adoption): a frame for human information evolution
  • post-digitalisation – evolved-digital
• Adding form explicitly to the framing
  
  • some of our form challenges
• Summary