Theories of Time and Temporality: A Guided Tour for Ontologists

Research in the logic, ontology, and metaphysics of time has over many years generated a bewildering variety of different theories and points of view, presenting a range of choices between, for example, A-theories vs B-theories, tensed vs tenseless logics, endurantism vs perdurantism, presentism vs eternalism, and three-dimensionalism vs four-dimensionalism. To add to all this there is the recurrent problem of how, if it is even possible at all, to reconcile “common sense” views of time with the findings of physics, in particular in relation to quantum theory and relativity. In this talk I will attempt to act as a “tour guide” through this rich and fascinating landscape, and in particular to point out the implications of different choices of theory for the practical ontologist, from both realist and conceptualist perspectives.

Bio
Having graduated in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge, Antony Galton took a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Leeds in 1981, and after five years of teaching mathematics in schools he returned to academic life to pursue a career lecturing in Computer Science at the University of Exeter. His research has ranged over numerous aspects of spatial and temporal knowledge representation and reasoning, but in recent years has increasingly focused on topics in formal and philosophical ontology. He is now retired from university life but continues to pursue his research interests, at least when he can resist the lure of the garden and the charms of village life.

Insights into large-scale ontology production

SNOMED CT is the most comprehensive, multilingual clinical healthcare terminology in the world, which enables consistent representation of clinical content in electronic health records. The core component types in SNOMED CT are concepts, descriptions and relationships. These concepts and descriptions represent diagnosis, clinical findings like signs and symptoms, therapeutic, diagnostic, and administrative procedures. It also includes observables (for example, heart rate), body structures, organisms, substances, pharmaceutical products, physical objects, and many other types of information. The meaning of concepts is defined by axioms in formal description logic, whereas inferred relationships between concepts are generated from axioms by reasoners to meet a variety of primary and secondary uses.

SNOMED International is a not-for-profit organization that owns and maintains SNOMED CT. The content has been developed collaboratively to ensure that it meets the diverse needs and expectations of clinicians worldwide. We engage with the global healthcare community to improve SNOMED CT and patient safety.

In this talk, I will cover the organisation structure, SNOMED CT logic profile, concept modelling and templates, content quality assurance, release and OWL representation.

Bio
Yongsheng Gao is a senior terminologist at SNOMED International. He is the co-chair of Modeling Advisory Group leading the SNOMED CT logic profile enhancements and model design. He has over 10 years’ extensive experience in terminology authoring, quality assurance and release. He actively participates in ISO standards for health informatics. Yong was trained in clinical medicine in China and further pursued PhD in health informatics in the field of knowledge representation, ontology and description logics in the UK. Prior to joining SNOMED International, he worked in the development of electronic patient record system and various terminologies in NHS.

ArCo: the Knowledge Graph of Italian Cultural Heritage

Slides

ArCo is a very ambitious ontology project. Starting from the official central catalogue of Italian Cultural Heritage (maintained by the Ministry) as its main source, its goal is to release an open knowledge graph encoding knowledge about the entities described in catalogue records. This means going beyond the mere representation of their metadata. Although there's still a long way to go, ArCo reached its first 'stable' version (https://w3id.org/arco). The experience in developing this project has taught us important lessons both in knowledge engineering in general, and on its application to Cultural Heritage. In this talk I will tell ArCo's story and lessons learned focusing on methodological, social and ontological perspectives.

Bio
Valentina Presutti, PhD, is Assistant Professor at University of Bologna and Associate Researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Science and Technology of CNR (Italy). She coordinates the Semantic Technology Laboratory since 2015 and is co-Director of the International Semantic Web Research Summer School. She has published 100+ articles in international journals/conferences/workshops. Her research stands at the crossing between Semantic Web and Artificial Intelligence, including knowledge graphs, ontology engineering, empirical semantics, and social robotics.
She is an editorial member of: J. of Web Semantics, J. of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Data Intelligence J., and Intelligenza Artificiale. She serves in the organising committees of top Semantic Web conferences such as ISWC and ESWC, and is senior PC for IJCAI since 2017.