Search results for " ontologies"

Paratransgenic manipulation of a tsetse microRNA alters the physiological homeostasis of the fly’s midgut environment

2021

Tsetse flies are vectors of parasitic African trypanosomes, the etiological agents of human and animal African trypanosomoses. Current disease control methods include fly-repelling pesticides, fly trapping, and chemotherapeutic treatment of infected people and animals. Inhibiting tsetse’s ability to transmit trypanosomes by strengthening the fly’s natural barriers can serve as an alternative approach to reduce disease. The peritrophic matrix (PM) is a chitinous and proteinaceous barrier that lines the insect midgut and serves as a protective barrier that inhibits infection with pathogens. African trypanosomes must cross tsetse’s PM in order to establish an infection in the fly, and PM struc…

A note on validity in law and regulatory systems (position paper)

2012

This is position paper is located at the theoretical crossroads of several projects: CAPER, EU Grant Agreement 261712; CROWDSOURCING DER2012-39492-C02-0, SINTELNET FP7-ICT-2009-C-286380; CONSUMEDIA INNPACTO IPT-2011-1015-430000; CROWD-CRISSCONTROL IPT-2012-0968-390000. The notion of validity fulfils a crucial role in legal theory. The emerging Web 3.0 opens a new landscape where Semantic Web languages, legal ontologies, and the construction of Normative Multiagent Systems are built up to cover new regulatory needs. Conceptual models for complex regulatory systems shape the characteristic features of rules, norms and principles in different ways. This position paper outlines one of such mult…

Knowledge Discovery and Digital Cartography for the ALS (Linguistic Atlas of Sicily) Project

2009

In this paper the latest developments of the ALS (Linguistic Atlas of Sicily) project are presented. The ALS project has the purpose to define methodologies and tools to allow researches in the socio-linguistic field. Different types of variables (both quantitative and qualitative) are involved. The whole framework is based on the definition of ontology-based applications for the creation, retrieval, manipulation and browsing of related data. To this aim, some mapping processes have been defined. The framework eventually shows the result in many ways including spatial maps. The on-going collaboration process is a perfect example a domain hybridizing process, enabling the training on-the-fie…

Design for invention: a framework for identifying emerging design–prior art conflict

2018

The increasing complexity of patented mechanical designs means that their novelty and inventive steps increasingly rely on interacting geometric features and how they contribute to device functions. These features and interactions are normally incorporated in patents through clear patent claims. However, patents can be difficult to interpret and understand for designers due to their legal terminologies. This suggests there is a need for greater awareness of relevant prior art amongst designers in terms of avoiding potential conflict. This paper presents a framework that helps designers obtain insight on relevant prior art and enables emerging design–prior art comparison. The framework mainl…

An Innovative Statistical Tool for Automatic OWL-ERD Alignment

2016

Aligning two representations of the same domain with different expressiveness is a crucial topic in nowadays semantic web and big data research. OWL ontologies and Entity Relation Diagrams are the most widespread representations whose alignment allows for semantic data access via ontology interface, and ontology storing techniques. The term ""alignment" encompasses three different processes: OWL-to-ERD and ERD-to-OWL transformation, and OWL-ERD mapping. In this paper an innovative statistical tool is presented to accomplish all the three aspects of the alignment. The main idea relies on the use of a HMM to estimate the most likely ERD sentence that is stated in a suitable grammar, and corre…

Advances onto the Internet of Things. How Ontologies Make the Internet of Things Meaningful.

2014

A Structural Approach to Infer Recurrent Relations in Data

2014

Extracting knowledge from a great amount of collected data has been a key problem in Artificial Intelligence during the last decades. In this context, the word "knowledge" refers to the non trivial new relations not easily deducible from the observation of the data. Several approaches have been used to accomplish this task, ranging from statistical to structural methods, often heavily dependent on the particular problem of interest. In this work we propose a system for knowledge extraction that exploits the power of an ontology approach. Ontology is used to describe, organise and discover new knowledge. To show the effectiveness of our system in extracting and generalising the knowledge emb…

An Approach to Enhance Chatbot Semantic Power and Maintainability: Experiences within the FRASI Project

2012

The paper illustrates the implementation and semantic enhancement of a domain-oriented Question-Answering system based on a pattern-matching chat bot technology, developed within an industrial project, named FRASI. The main difficulty in building a KB for a chat bot is to handwrite all possible question-answer pairs that constitute the KB. The proposed approach simplifies the chat bot realization thanks to two solutions. The first one uses an ontology, which is exploited in a twofold manner: to construct dynamic answers as a result of an inference process about the domain, and to automatically populate, off-line, the chat bot KB with sentences that can be derived from the ontology, describi…

Umani ed esistenti: somiglianze e distinzioni di carattere ontologico

2021

Review of Ph. Descola, Oltre natura e cultura, Raffaello Cortina, Milano, 2021

The place of livestock in human-nonhuman relationship among the Wayuu

2020

In the ethnology of indigenous LSA, the Wayuu case has always been considered a peculiar one. Among the main features which make difficult to insert it in the comparative debate on indigenous models of sociality and cosmology in this area, one can mention: pristine introduction of cattle raising; maintenance of political semi-autonomy till very recent times; development, already in the colonial period, of forms of social hierarchy based on ownership of livestock and other material goods; articulation of these forms with a system of matrilineal descent groups; interplay among the inclusive character of the descendants of mixed unions and the shifting of the traits selected for marking ethnic…