Browsing by Subject "Ontology"
Now showing 1 - 20 of 27
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Open Access Baker’s theory of material constitution and thinking things into existence(University of Warsaw, Institute of Philosophy, 2018) Kiymaz, TufanThe paper provides a critical evaluation of Lynne Rudder Baker’s nonmereological theory of material constitution in light of the “thinking into existence” objection, formulated by Theodore Sider and Dean W. Zimmerman. Although Baker responds to it, she focuses on its specific versions presented by Sider and Zimmerman and does not address the source of the problem. Baker maintains that beliefs, social practices, and conventions can bring a new intention-dependent object into existence. However, as I argue, the thinking into existence objection shows that constituted objects, if there are any, are ontologically independent of beliefs, social practices, and conventions. In fact, Baker’s theory doesn’t give us any reason for believing that intentiondependent objects are any more real than fictional objects.Item Open Access Batı Avrupa bilimine ontolojik temelleri ve Avrupa merkezci ideolojik içerimleri ekseninde Heideggeryen bir yaklaşım(Uludağ Üniversitesi İİBF, 2008) Demirel, İdrisBilim, insanî-toplumsal dünyada kültürel olarak inşa edilen bir bilme biçimidir. Bilim adıyla adlandırılan bilme biçimi, sanat, felsefe ve din gibi alternatiflerinden farklılaştırılırken, ön plana genel olarak kesinlik, nesnellik ve evrensellik benzeri ayırt edici karakteristikler çıkarılır. Bu çalışma, kökleri itibarıyla on altıncı yüzyıldaki Modernlik şafağına, ‘işlenmesi’ yönüyleyse Aydınlanma felsefesi ile akabindeki on dokuzuncu yüzyıl entelektüel akımlarına kadar geriye götürülebilen “Batı Avrupa bilimi”nin; mevcut yapı ve işlerliğine yönelik bir eleştiridir. Eleştiri çerçevesinde Batı Avrupa bilimi kavramı kullanılmaktadır. Kavramlaştırma Heidegger’e aittir. İnsan ve toplum bilimleri aksları üzerinden de tezahür eden sözkonusu bilim, Batı (kültürel bağlamda Avrupa) felsefesine yaslandığı gibi ayrıca Batı’nın üstünlüğünü gözeten siyasal içerimleri de haizdir. Dolayısıyla onun ayırt edici karakteristikleri gerçekte doğa bilimlerinin imitasyonu yoluyla sahip olunmak istenen vasıflardan ziyade Avrupamerkezcilik ideolojisine aittir. Avrupamerkezci ideolojik artalan, Batı Avrupa biliminin eleştirisini zorunlu kılmaktadır. Nitekim bu makalenin amacı da söz konusu eleştirilere kendi ölçeğinde bir katkı sağlamaktır.Item Open Access Bilge Karasu's animals : ethical and political encounters(Bilkent University, 2017-07) Gergöy, AdemIn his fiction and intellectual works Bilge Karasu (1930-1995) emphatically addresses the ethical and political problems that Critical Animal Studies have recently focused on in terms of human-animal relationships. In these works, the subject of animals is not a simple theme but rather a construction to investigate non-dominating meeting points between "the same" and "other". This thesis investigates how human "coexistence" with animals is conceived in Bilge Karasu's oeuvre. For this purpose I focus on the representation of animals in a selection of Bilge Karasu’s fictions, including Göçmüş Kediler Bahçesi, Kılavuz, Kısmet Büfesi, Narla İncire Gazel, Ne Kitapsız Ne Kedisiz. In analyzing the texts, Jacques Derrida's "animal question", which presented a new approach to Critical Animal Studies, was taken into account. The focus of this approach is the ethical and political problems brought about by "language" in human-animal relations. "Language", the focal point of human-animal separation, leads to the two main problems in human-animal relationships that complement each other. One cannot imagine animals in and of themselves because of the reductive nature of "language". Thus, the hurdle of “language” throws animals out of life and opens up endless ways of exploiting them. The questions this thesis focuses on in reading Bilge Karasu are as follows: Which ontological similarities and differences are emphasized between humans and animals in the texts? What effect does this predicted design have on the Karasu’s ethical vision? Which narrative strategies are followed as the result of this design? In brief, the conclusion reached at the end of this work is that the works of Bilge Karasu, a non-human-centered fictional world related to human-animal relations is established. In this world, man desires not to be set in contrast with animals but to lead a "side-by-side existence". The relations between human beings and animals are strikingly emphasized not through language but through face-to-face experience. Furthermore, in these texts, tools of literary representation such as symbols and metaphors that describe the encounters between the reader and animals have been transformed through postmodern narrative techniques.Item Open Access Collaborative workspaces for pathway curation(CEUR-WS, 2016-08) Durupınar-Babur, F.; Siper, Metin Can; Doğrusöz, Uğur; Bahceci, İstemi; Babur, O.; Demir, E.We present a web based visual biocuration workspace, focusing on curating detailed mechanistic pathways. It was designed as a flexible platform where multiple humans, NLP and AI agents can collaborate in real-time on a common model using an event driven API. We will use this platform for exploring disruptive technologies that can scale up biocuration such as NLP, human-computer collaboration, crowd-sourcing, alternative publishing and gamification. As a first step, we are designing a pilot to include an author-curation step into the scientific publishing, where the authors of an article create formal pathway fragments representing their discovery- heavily assisted by computer agents. We envision that this "microcuration" use-case will create an excellent opportunity to integrate multiple NLP approaches and semi-automated curation. © 2016, CEUR-WS. All rights reserved.Item Open Access Commonsense aspects of buying and selling(Taylor & Francis Inc., 1996) Akman, V.; Ersan, M.We describe an experimental approach toward implementing a commonsense "microtheory" for buying and selling. Our prototype system characterizes how intelligent agents hold items and money, how they buy and sell items, and the way money and items are transferred. The ontology of the system includes money (cash, check, credit card), agents (people, organizations), items (movable, real estate, service), barter, and the notions of transfer, loan, buying by installments, profit, and loss.Item Open Access Design and evaluation of an ontology based information extraction system for radiological reports(Pergamon Press, 2010) Soysal, E.; Cicekli, I.; Baykal, N.This paper describes an information extraction system that extracts and converts the available information in free text Turkish radiology reports into a structured information model using manually created extraction rules and domain ontology. The ontology provides flexibility in the design of extraction rules, and determines the information model for the extracted semantic information. Although our information extraction system mainly concentrates on abdominal radiology reports, the system can be used in another field of medicine by adapting its ontology and extraction rule set. We achieved very high precision and recall results during the evaluation of the developed system with unseen radiology reports. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd.Item Open Access Design and implementation of a system for mapping text meaning representations to f-structures of Turkish sentences(Bilkent University, 1997) Temizsoy, Selman MuratInterlingua approach to Machine Translation (MT) aims to achieve the translation task in two independent steps. First, the meanings of source language sentences are represented in a language-independent artificial language. Then, sentences of the target language are generated from those meaning representations. Generation task in this approach is performed in three major steps among which the second step creates the syntactic structure of a sentence from its meaning representation and selects the words to be used in that sentence. This thesis focuses on the design and the implementation of a prototype system that performs this second task. The meaning representation used in this work utilizes a hierarchical world representation, ontology, to denote events and entities, and embeds semantic and pragmatic issues with special frames. The developed system is language-independent and it takes information about the target language from three knowledge resources: lexicon (word knowledge), map-rules (the relation between the meaning representation and the syntactic structure), and target language's syntactic structure representation. It performs two major tasks in processing the meaning representation: lexical selection and mapping the two representations of a sentence . The implemented system is tested on Turkish using small-sized knowledge resources developed for Turkish. The output of the system can be fed as input to a tactical generator, which is developed for Turkish, to produce the final Turkish sentences.Item Open Access Design and implementation of a verb lexicon and verb sense disambiguator for Turkish(Bilkent University, 1994) Yılmaz, OkanThe lexicon has a crucial role in all natural language processing systems and has special importance in machine translation systems. This thesis presents the design and implementation of a verb lexicon and a verb sense disambigua- tor for Turkish. The lexicon contains only verbs because verbs encode events in sentences and play the most important role in natural language processing systems, especially in parsing (syntactic analyzing) and machine translation. The verb sense disambiguator uses the information stored in the verb lexicon that we developed. The main purpose of this tool is to disambiguate senses of verbs having several meanings, some of which are idiomatic. We also present a tool implemented in Lucid Common Lisp under X-Windows for adding, accessing, modifying, and removing entries of the lexicon, and a semantic concept ontology containing semantic features of commonly used Turkish nouns.Item Open Access Diverse consequences of algorithmic probability(Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2013) Özkural, ErayWe reminisce and discuss applications of algorithmic probability to a wide range of problems in artificial intelligence, philosophy and technological society. We propose that Solomonoff has effectively axiomatized the field of artificial intelligence, therefore establishing it as a rigorous scientific discipline. We also relate to our own work in incremental machine learning and philosophy of complexity. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.Item Open Access Evaluation of ontology enhancement tools(Springer, 2005-10) Spiliopoulou, M.; Schaal, Markus; Müller, R. M.; Brunzel, M.Mining algorithms can enhance the task of ontology establishment but methods are needed to assess the quality of their findings. Ontology establishment is a long-term interactive process, so it is important to evaluate the contribution of a mining tool at an early phase of this process so that only appropriate tools are used in later phases. We propose a method for the evaluation of such tools on their impact on ontology enhancement. We model impact as quality perceived by the expert and as statistical quality computed by an objective function. We further provide a mechanism that juxtaposes the two forms of quality. We have applied our method on an ontology enhancement tool and gained some interesting insights on the interplay between perceived impact and statistical quality. © 2006 Springer-Verlag.Item Restricted Hans Jonas, the philosophy of nature, and the ethics of responsibility(1989) Donnelley, StrachanItem Restricted Lukacs' later ontology(1990) Browne, PaulItem Open Access Modeling a user-oriented ontology on accessible homes for supporting activities of daily living (ADL) in healthy aging(Association for Computing Machinery, 2019) Afacan, Yasemin; Sürer, E.Inaccessibility of the buildings is the most common obstacle which presents barriers for older adults with different motor abilities. An inclusive design process, where elderly and designers work together, is required to overcome this obstacle. To do so, this study proposes a user-oriented model (i) to define a knowledge presentation for designers; (ii) to assist them during the development of accessible homes and (iii) to accommodate exemplary home attributes for activities of daily living (ADL). The ontology for this model was first constructed by collecting user information through LEGO® Serious Play® on the four subdomains of motor abilities: (1) strength; (2) balance; (3) locomotion; and (4) endurance. The findings of this study are significant for future aging studies and mobile computing researches in terms of indicating that diverse motor ability difficulties are associated with different requirements of accessibility attributes, and structured knowledge is required to diagrammatize their association with ADL.Item Open Access Natural language querying for video databases(Elsevier Inc., 2008-06-15) Erozel, G.; Cicekli, N. K.; Cicekli, I.The video databases have become popular in various areas due to the recent advances in technology. Video archive systems need user-friendly interfaces to retrieve video frames. In this paper, a user interface based on natural language processing (NLP) to a video database system is described. The video database is based on a content-based spatio-temporal video data model. The data model is focused on the semantic content which includes objects, activities, and spatial properties of objects. Spatio-temporal relationships between video objects and also trajectories of moving objects can be queried with this data model. In this video database system, a natural language interface enables flexible querying. The queries, which are given as English sentences, are parsed using link parser. The semantic representations of the queries are extracted from their syntactic structures using information extraction techniques. The extracted semantic representations are used to call the related parts of the underlying video database system to return the results of the queries. Not only exact matches but similar objects and activities are also returned from the database with the help of the conceptual ontology module. This module is implemented using a distance-based method of semantic similarity search on the semantic domain-independent ontology, WordNet. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.Item Open Access An ontology for computer-aided modeling of cellular processes(Bilkent University, 2005-10) Emek, DemirCellular processes form the hardware layer of living organisms. Malfunctions in cellular processes are responsible for most of the currently incurable diseases. Not surprisingly, knowledge about cellular processes are growing at an enormous rate. However, today’s molecular biology suffers from lack of a formal representation system for cellular processes. Most of the knowledge is locked in literature, that are not accessible to computational analysis and modeling. Given the complexity of the system we are attacking, the need for a representation system and modeling tools for cellular processes are clear. In this dissertation, we describe an ontology for modeling processes. Our ontology possesses several unique features, including ability to represent abstractions and multiple levels of detail, cellular compartments and molecular states. Furthermore, it was designed to meet several user and system requirements, including ease of integration, querying, analysis and visualization. Based on this ontology we also implemented a set of software tools within the Patika project. Primary use cases of Patika are integration, querying and visualization, and we have obtained satisfactory results proving the feasibility of our ontology. Compared with existing alternative methods of representing and querying information about cellular processes, Patika provides several advantages, including a regular representation system, powerful querying options, an advanced visualization. Moreover Patika models can be analyzed by computational methods such as flux analysis or pathway activity inference. Although it has a more steep learning curve compared to existing ad hoc representation systems, we believe that tools like Patika will be essential for molecular biology research in the future.Item Open Access An ontology-based universal design knowledge support system(Elsevier, 2011-05) Afacan, Yasemin; Demirkan, H.An effective and efficient knowledge support system is crucial for universal design process, as it has become a major design issue in the last decade with the growth of the elderly population and disabled people. There are a limited number of CAD investigations on the nature of knowledge processing that supports the cognitive activities of universal design process. Therefore, this paper proposes an ontology-based computer-assisted universal design (CAUD) plug-in tool that supports designers in developing satisfactory universal design solutions in the conceptual design phase. The required knowledge processing and representation of the developed tool is motivated by the ontological language. It is based on the multiple divergence-convergence cognitive strategies and cognitive needs of designers in the analysis/synthesis/evaluation operations. The CAUD plug-in tool is the first attempt to interface the universal design knowledge ontologically and respond to the requirements of conceptual design phase. According to the user acceptance study, the tool is assessed as useful, understandable, efficient, supportive and satisfactory.Item Open Access Problems of ontology in Gilles Deleuze's philosophy(Bilkent University, 2008) Öztürk, HaydarThis thesis bases on the examination of Deleuze and Guattari’s some philosophical concepts to argue that existence means connections and we need an ontology of “and” that is able to reflect this meaning. In this thesis, the relations of things are grasped without introducing ontological hierarchy between them and traditional ontological concepts are introduced in order to refer the problem of connection. In that respect, the concept of machine and its correspondences in their philosophy are read in an ontological context, and some aesthetical and political results of ontology of “and” are emphasized.Item Open Access The reappearing act(2009) Aranyosi, I.In his latest book, Roy Sorensen offers a solution to a puzzle he put forward in an earlier article -The Disappearing Act. The puzzle involves various question about how the causal theory perception is to be applied to the case of seeing shadows. Sorensen argues that the puzzle should be taken as bringing out a new way of seeing shadows. I point out a problem for Sorensen's solution, and offer and defend an alternative view, according to which the puzzle is to be interpreted as showing a new way of seeing objects, in virtue of their contrast with light.Item Open Access A signal transduction score flow algorithm for cyclic cellular pathway analysis, which combines transcriptome and ChIP-seq data(Royal Society of Chemistry, 2012) Isik, Z.; Ersahin, T.; Atalay, V.; Aykanat, Cevdet; Cetin Atalay, R.Determination of cell signalling behaviour is crucial for understanding the physiological response to a specific stimulus or drug treatment. Current approaches for large-scale data analysis do not effectively incorporate critical topological information provided by the signalling network. We herein describe a novel model- and data-driven hybrid approach, or signal transduction score flow algorithm, which allows quantitative visualization of cyclic cell signalling pathways that lead to ultimate cell responses such as survival, migration or death. This score flow algorithm translates signalling pathways as a directed graph and maps experimental data, including negative and positive feedbacks, onto gene nodes as scores, which then computationally traverse the signalling pathway until a pre-defined biological target response is attained. Initially, experimental data-driven enrichment scores of the genes were computed in a pathway, then a heuristic approach was applied using the gene score partition as a solution for protein node stoichiometry during dynamic scoring of the pathway of interest. Incorporation of a score partition during the signal flow and cyclic feedback loops in the signalling pathway significantly improves the usefulness of this model, as compared to other approaches. Evaluation of the score flow algorithm using both transcriptome and ChIP-seq data-generated signalling pathways showed good correlation with expected cellular behaviour on both KEGG and manually generated pathways. Implementation of the algorithm as a Cytoscape plug-in allows interactive visualization and analysis of KEGG pathways as well as user-generated and curated Cytoscape pathways. Moreover, the algorithm accurately predicts gene-level and global impacts of single or multiple in silico gene knockouts. This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2012.Item Open Access Simulated physical ageing: a prioritized persona-based model for accessible interiors in senior housing environments(SAGE Publications, 2020) Taşoz, Şevkiye Merve; Afacan, YaseminAccessibility is a critical interior design consideration that increases performance level and allows older adults to be independent and physically active in their daily activities. This study used a case study to present a new method of combining ageing simulation with personas through importance-performance analysis (IPA) and supporting the basic activities of daily living (BADL). This study developed a prioritized persona-based (PP-B) model to create accessible interiors in senior housing environments for healthy ageing. This model was constructed based on an ontology framework. The data that was gathered through the self-assessment accessibility questionnaire by 60 older adults and it was depicted in the IPA matrix, which later translated into personas. These personas were simulated with an ageing suit by interior architecture students based on the BADL of accessible senior housing environments. This study was an initial attempt to deal with the complex nature of accessible interior design and its attributes for ageing studies, which are often considered as theoretical concepts and standards. The main innovation of this developed PP-B model was to synchronize interior design knowledge on accessibility attributes and users’ BADL performance along their accessibility importance rankings. Findings are beneficial for interior designers to make human-centred interior design decisions.