An Ontology of Representation

Abstract

Representations are largely used in scientific domains and in everyday life alike. When discussed as such, representations are evaluated primarily for the information (correct or incorrect, precise or imprecise, detailed or general) that they provide. In philosophy, information is mainly discussed along with the notion of aboutness, and in application-oriented communities with notions such as data and knowledge. From the ontological viewpoint, this adds to representation shortcomings from both viewpoints. We argue that the theory of representation is articulated, and that it is possible to address some aspects, such as the form–content relationship, without taking position on others, such as the aboutness relationship. In this paper, a representation is a complex ontological entity formed by a representation form and a representation content bound by an encoding relationship. This ontological model of representation leads to correctly answer questions like: “Ontologically speaking, what is a novel?” (and similarly for a painting, a piece of music, etc.) The broadness and flexibility of the proposed model are tested by discussing a list of different cases: from music to procedures, from novels to paintings, and maps. The status of letters (characters) in natural language expressions, which turns out to be quite complex, is also briefly investigated.

Keywords

form content representing specification data information

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Borgo

Ferrario

Gangemi

Guarino

Masolo

Porello

Sanfilippo

E. M.

Vieu

(2022). Dolce: A descriptive ontology for linguistic and cognitive engineering. Applied Ontology, 17(1), 45–69. http://doi.org/10.3233/AO-210259

Borgo

Galton

Kutz

(2022). Foundational ontologies in action. Understanding foundational ontology through examples. Applied Ontology, 17(1), 1–16. http://doi.org/10.3233/AO-220265

Ceusters

(2012). An information artifact ontology perspective on data collections and associated representational artifacts. In J. Mantas, S. K. Andersen, M. C. Mazzoleni, B. Blobel, S. Quaglini, & A. Moen (Eds.), Quality of life through quality of information – proceedings of MIE2012, the XXIVth international congress of the European Federation for medical informatics, Pisa, Italy, August 26–29, 2012. Vol. 180 of Studies in health technology and informatics (pp. 68–72). IOS Press.

Dummett

(1981). Frege: Philosophy of language. Harvard University Press.

Kassel

(2023). A plea for epistemic ontologies. Applied Ontology, 18(4), 367–397. https://doi.org/10.3233/AO-230031

Lehrer

(2018). Theory of knowledge. Routledge.

Lewis

(2008). Convention: A philosophical study. John Wiley & Sons.

Loebe

Burek

Herre

(2022). GFO: The general formal ontology. Applied Ontology, 17(1), 71–106. https://doi.org/10.3233/AO-220264

Mizoguchi

(2004). Tutorial on ontological engineering: Part 3: Advanced course of ontological engineering. New Generation Computing, 22(2), 193–220.

10.

Mizoguchi

(2010). Yamato: Yet another more advanced top-level ontology. In Proceedings of the Sixth Australasian Ontology Workshop. (pp. 1–16). Citeseer.

11.

Mizoguchi

Borgo

(2022). Yamato: Yet-another more advanced top-level ontology. Applied Ontology, 17(1), 211–232. https://doi.org/10.3233/AO-210257

12.

Mizoguchi

Galton

Kitamura

Kozaki

(2015). Families of roles: A new theory of occurrent-dependent roles. Applied Ontology, 10(3–4), 367–399. https://doi.org/10.3233/AO-150148

13.

Mizoguchi

Sunagawa

Kozaki

Kitamura

(April 2007). The model of roles within an ontology development tool: Hozo. Applied Ontology, 2, 159–179. https://doi.org/10.3233/APO-2007-038

14.

(1999). Moral and philosophical implications of Chinese calligraphy. Grand Valley Review, 20(1), 8.

15.

Pitt

(2022). Mental representation. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Fall 2022 edition. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

16.

Rescorla

(2024). The computational theory of mind. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Winter 2024 edition. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

17.

Sanfilippo

E. M.

(2021). Ontologies for information entities: State of the art and open challenges. Applied Ontology, 16(2), 111–135. https://doi.org/10.3233/AO-210246

18.

Sanfilippo

E. M.

Masolo

Bottazzi

Ferrario

(2024). Interpreting texts and their characters. In Formal ontology in information systems – FOIS (pp. 1–14). IOS Press. https://doi.org/10.3233/FAIA241299

19.

Siegel

(2024). The contents of perception. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Fall 2024 edition. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

20.

Smith

Ceusters

(2010). Ontological realism: A methodology for coordinated evolution of scientific ontologies. Applied Ontology, 5(3–4), 139–188. https://doi.org/10.3233/AO-2010-0076

21.

Smith

Ceusters

(2015). Aboutness: Towards foundations for the information artifact ontology. In Proceedings of the international conference on biomedical ontology (ICBO) 2015. (Vol. 1515, pp. 1–5). CEUR.

22.

Thagard

(2023). Cognitive science. In E. N. Zalta & U. Nodelman (Eds.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, Winter 2023 edition. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

23.

Thomasson

A. L.

(2016). The ontology of literary works. In The Routledge companion to philosophy of literature (pp. 349–358). Routledge.

24.

Yablo

(2014). Aboutness. Princeton University Press.

25.

Zins

(2007). Conceptual approaches for defining data, information, and knowledge. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 58(4), 479–493.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.18 MB