DOLCE: A descriptive ontology for linguistic and cognitive engineering1

dolce, the first top-level (foundational) ontology to be axiomatized, has remained stable for twenty years and today is broadly used in a variety of domains. dolce is inspired by cognitive and linguistic considerations and aims to model a commonsense view of reality, like the one human beings exploit in everyday life in areas as diverse as socio-technical systems, manufacturing, financial transactions and cultural heritage. dolce clearly lists the ontological choices it is based upon, relies on philosophical principles, is richly formalized, and is built according to well-established ontological methodologies, e.g. OntoClean. Because of these features, it has inspired most of the existing top-level ontologies and has been used to develop or improve standards and public domain resources (e.g. CIDOC CRM, DBpedia and WordNet). Being a foundational ontology, dolce is not directly concerned with domain knowledge. Its purpose is to provide the general categories and relations needed to give a coherent view of reality, to integrate domain knowledge, and to mediate across domains. In these 20 years dolce has shown that applied ontologies can be stable and that interoperability across reference and domain ontologies is a reality. This paper briefly introduces the ontology and shows how to use it on a few modeling cases.

White Matter Connectivity Reflects Success in Musical Improvisation

Creativity is the ability to produce work that is novel, high in quality, and appropriate to an audience. One domain of creativity comes from musical improvisation, in which individuals spontaneously create novel auditory-motor sequences that are aesthetically rewarding. Here we test the hypothesis that individual differences in creative behavior are subserved by mesial and lateral differences in white matter connectivity. We compare jazz improvising musicians against classical (non-improvising) musicians and non-musician control subjects in musical performance and diffusion tensor imaging. Subjects improvised on short musical motifs and underwent DTI. Statistical measures of fluency and entropy for musical performances predicted expert ratings of creativity for each performance. Tract-Based Spatial Statistics (TBSS) showed higher Fractional Anisotropy (FA) in the cingulate cortex and corpus callosum in jazz musicians. FA in the cingulate also correlated with entropy. Probabilistic tractography from these mesial regions to lateral seed regions of the arcuate fasciculus, a pathway known to be involved in sound perception and production, showed mesial-to-lateral connectivity that correlated with improvisation training. Results suggest that white matter connectivity between lateral and mesial structures may integrate domain-general and domain-specific components of creativity.

Research on feature-based opinion mining using topic maps

Purpose Opinion mining (OM), also known as “sentiment classification”, which aims to discover common patterns of user opinions from their textual statements automatically or semi-automatically, is not only useful for customers, but also for manufacturers. However, because of the complexity of natural language, there are still some problems, such as domain dependence of sentiment words, extraction of implicit features and others. The purpose of this paper is to propose an OM method based on topic maps to solve these problems. Design/methodology/approach Domain-specific knowledge is key to solve problems in feature-based OM. On the one hand, topic maps, as an ontology framework, are composed of topics, associations, occurrences and scopes, and can represent a class of knowledge representation schemes. On the other hand, compared with ontology, topic maps have many advantages. Thus, it is better to integrate domain-specific knowledge into OM based on topic maps. This method can make full use of the semantic relationships among feature words and sentiment words. Findings In feature-level OM, most of the existing research associate product features and opinions by their explicit co-occurrence, or use syntax parsing to judge the modification relationship between opinion words and product features within a review unit. They are mostly based on the structure of language units without considering domain knowledge. Only few methods based on ontology incorporate domain knowledge into feature-based OM, but they only use the “is-a” relation between concepts. Therefore, this paper proposes feature-based OM using topic maps. The experimental results revealed that this method can improve the accuracy of the OM. The findings of this study not only advance the state of OM research but also shed light on future research directions. Research limitations/implications To demonstrate the “feature-based OM using topic maps” applications, this work implements a prototype that helps users to find their new washing machines. Originality/value This paper presents a new method of feature-based OM using topic maps, which can integrate domain-specific knowledge into feature-based OM effectively. This method can improve the accuracy of the OM greatly. The proposed method can be applied across various application domains, such as e-commerce and e-government.

THE ABILITY TO INTEGRATE DIFFERENT TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE AND ITS EFFECT ON INNOVATION PERFORMANCE

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of a firm's ability to integrate knowledge on their innovation performance, in order to help firm's prioritise their resources, used for knowledge integration, more effectively. Data were collected from a survey mailed to R&D managers in firms with between 100–1,000 employees in a cross-section of industries. Five hypotheses were tested using multiple regression analysis with and without interaction terms. The results indicate that a categorisation of knowledge is useful for understanding knowledge integration. The study also shows that the ability to integrate domain-specific knowledge is significantly related to innovation performance. Furthermore, the results indicate that technology turbulence in the industry has a positive moderating effect on the above relation. Managerial implications suggest how managers can focus their efforts in order to effectively integrate knowledge in product development projects.

Is One Dimension Enough?: A Response to Simonton's Varieties of (Scientific) Creativity (2009)

We admire Simonton's valiant attempt to bring all of creativity under a single dimension. We offer a view that is sometimes complementary and sometimes distinct from Simonton's model: Our own multidimensional amusement park theoretical model, which tries to integrate domain-specific and domain-general points of view. We eagerly await future research on Simonton's model and are curious of how his hard–soft dimension can be included into the creativity pantheon.