Directly depicting granular ontologies

2004

We propose an ontological theory that is powerful enough to describe both complex spatio-temporal processes and the enduring entities that participate therein. For this purpose we introduce the notion of a directly depicting ontology. Directly depicting ontologies are based on relatively simple languages and fall into two major categories: ontologies of type SPAN and ontologies of type SNAP. These represent two complementary perspectives on reality and employ distinct though compatible systems of categories.

2003

Abstract We propose an ontological theory that is powerful enough to describe both complex spatio-temporal processes (occurrents) and the enduring entities (continuants) that participate therein. The theory is divided into two major categories of sub-theories:(sub-) theories of type SPAN and (sub-) theories of type SNAP. These theories represent two complementary perspectives on reality and result in distinct though compatible systems of categories.

Spatial Cognition & Computation, 2004

Masters Thesis, 2013

The community needs assessment survey was designed to collect three specific sets of data or information from respondents, to identify and rank the unique needs of KunduchWard. The Overall Objective of the project is to build a foundation of knowledge to prioritize the community needs. With the limited time available the questionnaire was limited to 50 respondents selected randomly from sub-Sub-ward/Mtaa inclusive of both gender and age groups. The tools used to gather information included household questionnaires, focus group discussions, interviewing Officials at District and Sub-ward/Mtaalevels. The survey findings revealed that, by using pair wise ranking CED Student and JiweGumu and Community come up with the decision of poultry farming project. This project sets out to review the contribution of poultry to smallholder livelihoods economically, as well as socially and culturally – and to smallholder household food security. The theoretical review details various ideas on the po...

Urdimento, 2018

2009

What I want to talk about, as the title suggests, is "The unpredictability of contemporary global conflicts"-and I will try to make my discussion of it not only as interesting, but as polemical as I can 1. Note that this is a title I would like you to actually take at face-value. We do indeed live in an unpredictable world, and surely we all remember when this was not really so, in particular as concerns dangers and scopes of wars. Most people here were grown-ups in the late 1980`s, early 1990`s, and most very aware of the thrill of 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, or that of 1991, with the implosion of the Soviet Union. That magical year and a half that was so exciting for all of us! But what came next also created confusion: we used to live in a world where things (or so we felt) had their places, where things were rangées. We used to call that "the bipolar world". Surely, we all remember how 'the bipolar world' was born, out of the ashes of World War II, when the USSR refused to disarm, stayed in Eastern and Central Europe, and broke with the rest of the Allies. The post-World War II order was divided up into two worlds. This rather neat bipolarity disappeared in 1991-or, at least, our feelings that there was a bipolar international order swiftly faded away. I am certain every one remembers how, in 1991, we had the illusion that History had come to its end; retrospectively, we all thought (and perhaps most of us even believed), at least for what was later wisely called a 'unipolar moment', that peace and homogeneity of sorts had arrived. The State dubbed 'the sole superpower', the United States of America, remained, alone in victory-and very quickly, that superpower began reordering the world according to its own image. The political Left, in fact, then discussed not as much the unipolarity of the world as the Americanisation of the world. There was, indeed, some substance to such representations. All happened, in fact, as if nothing but a political prêt-aporter had remained-as if, after the implosion of the USSR, one sole model was available for societies (States and States-to-be) to pick. We seemed to have arrived at a situation in which there really was only one political system: representative democracy; and that came hand in hand with one sole economic system: market economics. This, of course, had a huge impact in the world, one that reverberated throughout the international system. Among other things, it gave rise (or accelerated the élan) of what Samuel Huntington had some years earlier called "the third wave of democratisation"-somehow echoing the idea that an end of history of sorts had indeed arrived. The impact of this generalization of the US and Western political models was huge. Let me give you one example only of its unprecedented scale. Of the fifty-two then extant African States [or fifty-three, if you want to include the self-denominated 'Arab-Sahauri Democratic Republic'], forty-seven-an incredibly high percentage-had a democratic PAGE 18 1 The following text consists of a transcription of an impromptu talk I had the honour and pleasure of giving at the Vienna Diplomatic Academy on the 14th of May, 2008, in its superb Festsaal. I, of course, came to my talk with fairly clear ideas of both what I wanted to say and a sequential strategy on how to go about it, but I did not have any written text to follow. Although I skipped some of the transcribed text (namely one or two jokes, and some grammatical imprecision and repetitions) by and large I have kept in this text the oral style of my delivery. I am indebted to Radu Dudau for his wise advice on the present written version.