The ontological politics of freshness: Qualities of food and sustainability governance

Freshness is a key feature of contemporary food systems, however its industrial production as a quality of food carries adverse consequences. Accordingly, this paper approaches freshness as a matter of concern. Drawing on extensive fieldwork across sites of food production and consumption in the UK and Portugal, we identify four enactments of freshness. The analysis zooms in on the specific case of plastic food packaging and uses these enactments to consider a series of questions about realities and the relationships between them. Since packaging is an issue that readily overflows to encompass a broader suite of propositions about food, we argue that freshness is a suitable focus around which to assemble hybrid forums to debate future possibilities. Joining a body of recent work that brings relational-materialist sensibilities to bear on sustainability governance, we demonstrate that these ideas are not exhausted by a concern with the ways in which existing ontologies are brought together in policy. To conclude, we suggest that attention to the multiple ontologies of qualities complements and extends approaches that focus on objects by offering a conduit that brings understandings of markets into discussions of ontological politics.

Introduction to the special issue “Climate and marine justice – debates and critical perspectives”

This special issue (SI) shows that environmental justice perspectives are especially useful for analysing current socio-ecological conflicts. These perspectives help to bridge epistemological and ontological gaps in inter- and transdisciplinary settings and promote normative and justice-oriented discussions on environmental struggles within and beyond the academy. Currently, the following two interrelated environmental crises and their impacts regularly make headlines: climate change and the impacts of the unsustainable use of the oceans. Still, for a large part of the global population – not only but especially in the Global North – both crises remain abstract, mainly becoming visible through news coverage of plastic waste in the oceans, storm surges and droughts, and through documentaries on sea-level rise and the destruction of ecosystems. However, the destruction of marine and coastal habitats and the effects of climate change are increasingly affecting people's daily lives. The effects of climate change, pollution, and marine resource overuse are creating serious disruption to livelihoods and leading to new socio-ecological conflicts and new claims. This SI aims to reflect and explore climate and marine narratives, environmental knowledge claims, multiple ontologies, climate change adaptation, and the spatial and temporal shaping of socio-ecological struggles for climate and marine justice in more detail. Furthermore, it takes up current strands of climate and marine justice scholarship and explores avenues for further research.

Addressing the Challenges of Interoperability and Cultural Heritage Data

One of the ongoing challenges for effective utilization of heritage science data is the lack of access to well-organized and accessible extant data sets and the need to structure data in formats that allow interrogation and integration of related data. This need for data fusion expands to both subjective and objective measurements and descriptors, as well as a long-overdue need for established guidelines for metadata and shared terminologies, or more critically, ontologies. Research into this area has shown the need for Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS) that bridge and integrate multiple ontologies that address specific needs – for example the Getty Vocabularies for cultural heritage terms, the Linked Art model for a simplified core CIDOC-CRM, as well as the OBO Foundry and other scientific ontologies for measurements and heritage science terminology.[1]

OBO Foundry in 2021: Operationalizing Open Data Principles to Evaluate Ontologies

Biological ontologies are used to organize, curate, and interpret the vast quantities of data arising from biological experiments. While this works well when using a single ontology, integrating multiple ontologies can be problematic, as they are developed independently, which can lead to incompatibilities. The Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Foundry was created to address this by facilitating the development, harmonization, application, and sharing of ontologies, guided by a set of overarching principles. One challenge in reaching these goals was that the OBO principles were not originally encoded in a precise fashion, and interpretation was subjective. Here we show how we have addressed this by formally encoding the OBO principles as operational rules and implementing a suite of automated validation checks and a dashboard for objectively evaluating each ontology's compliance with each principle. This entailed a substantial effort to curate metadata across all ontologies and to coordinate with individual stakeholders. We have applied these checks across the full OBO suite of ontologies, revealing areas where individual ontologies require changes to conform to our principles. Our work demonstrates how a sizable federated community can be organized and evaluated on objective criteria that help improve overall quality and interoperability, which is vital for the sustenance of the OBO project and towards the overall goals of making data FAIR.

Craft as More-Than-Human

This article considers craft science and practice-led research in light of more-than-human approaches to practice under the heading posthumanism, as found within humanities and social sciences in recent years. Practice-led research within craft science, represents a vital and ground-breaking field of inquiry, as an embodied subjective field of examination with an impressive ability to gain deep knowledge of various forms of skilled and/or natural practices. One aspect of practice that this research seems less able to grasp, is a broader practical connection between multiple ontologies of human and non-human practice. Going beyond a purely human phenomenology of craft, this article seeks a more symmetrical and post-anthropocentric approach to knowledge and materiality, as practice in multiple ontologies. This would mean a shift in how craft science view practice, from being a strictly operational aspect adhering to human practitioners, to practice as an ongoing more-than-human process by which phenomena (and practitioners) are brought into being and are maintained.

A faster and less aggressive algorithm for correcting conservativity violations in ontology alignments

Ontologies are computational artifacts that model consensual aspects of reality. In distributed contexts, applications often need to utilize information from several distinct ontologies. In order to integrate multiple ontologies, entities modeled in each ontology must be matched through an ontology alignment. However, imperfect alignments may introduce inconsistencies. One kind of inconsistency, which is often introduced, is the violation of the conservativity principle, that states that the alignment should not introduce new subsumption relations between entities from the same source ontology. We propose a two-step quadratic-time algorithm for automatically correcting such violations, and evaluate it against datasets from the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2019, comparing the results to a state-of-the-art approach. The proposed algorithm was significantly faster and less aggressive; that is, it performed fewer modifications over the original alignment when compared to the state-of-the-art algorithm.

Digitalization of Bulgarian Residential Architecture in and around the Bulgarian Revival Period – Typological Groups and Houses

The article presents the Bulgarian Revival architecture in the context of Informatics, and in particular of the Artificial Intelligence. Ontological engineering is dealing with the semantic modeling of real-world concepts and the relations between them under the influence of semantic axioms and machine-readable judgments. Ontologies that are described in the article were developed to be included in the repository with multiple ontologies for Bulgarian cultural and historical heritage. Keywords: Оntology; Semantic Мodelling; Protégé; Revival Аrchitecture; Intelligent Tourist Guide

“One or Many Ontologies? Badiou’s Arguments for His Thesis ‘Mathematics is Ontology’”

This article explores rival interpretations of Badiou’s strategy behind the claim ‘mathematics is ontology’, from his construction of an alternative history of being to that of Heidegger to his exposure of the radical contingency of the ‘decisions on being’ carried out by transformative practices in the four conditions of philosophy: art, politics, love and science. The goal of this exploration is to open up the possibility of another strategy that responds to Badiou’s initial intuition – that being is multiple – by embracing the writing of multiple ontologies in the sphere of action.

Plural Bodies, Pluriversal Humans: Questioning the Ontology of ‘Body’ in Design

All designing, as well as everything designed, is ontological: things shape and form humans, just as humans shape and give form to them (Willis, 2006, Fry, 2013). However, there is no ontology of the human in the singular sense, but plural, multiple ontologies, and therefore, no human, but only humans. This paper proposes the introduction of a provocation to disturb notions of the ontologically designed body, and in fact, of how we think of what a ‘body’ is, by turning to the insights offered up by a body of literature hitherto relatively unexamined in design research: the ontological turn in anthropology. By turning to a survey of the work done by cultural anthropologists on different cosmologies and cultures, I intend to demonstrate that the Anglo-Eurocentric conception of the ontologically singular body, signified in terms of the “universality” of human biology, is in fact, only one of many ways of bodily being and relating to the body; that matters of the body are locally situated and specific to communities and environments; and therefore, what we mean by ‘the body’ is in fact also plural, multistable, and wrought with incommensurabilities between human communities and cultures. The essay will end with a re-evaluation of ontological designing and speculations on what design could do, through an engagement with examples of ‘other’ ontologies and definitions of body.