Biopolitics meets Terrapolitics: Political Ontologies and Governance in Settler-Colonial Australia

Crises persist in Australian Indigenous affairs because current policy approaches do not address the intersection of Indigenous and European political worlds. This paper responds to this challenge by providing a heuristic device for delineating Settler and Indigenous Australian political ontologies and considering their interaction. It first evokes Settler and Aboriginal ontologies as respectively biopolitical (focused through life) and terrapolitical (focused through land). These ideal types help to identify important differences that inform current governance challenges. The paper discusses the entwinement of these traditions as a story of biopolitical dominance wherein Aboriginal people are governed as an “included-exclusion” within the Australian political community. Despite the overall pattern of dominance, this same entwinement offers possibilities for exchange between biopolitics and terrapolitics, and hence for breaking the recurrent crises of Indigenous affairs.

Applying ontologies to business and systems modelling techniques and perspectives: Lessons learned

For many years in the area of business systems analysis and design, practitioners and researchers alike have been searching for some comprehensive basis on which to evaluate, compare, and engineer techniques that are promoted for use in the modelling of systems' requirements. To date, while many frameworks, factors, and facets have been forthcoming, none appear to be based on a sound theory. In light of this dilemma, over the last 10 years, attention has been devoted by researchers to the use of ontology to provide some theoretical basis for the advancement of the business systems modelling discipline. This paper outlines how we have used a particular ontology for this purpose over the last five years. In particular we have learned that the understandability and the applicability of the selected ontology must be clear for IS professionals, the results of any ontological evaluation must be tempered by economic efficiency considerations of the stakeholders involved, and ontologies may have to be focused for the business purpose and type of user involved in the modelling situation.

Using BWW model to evaluate building ontologies in CGs formalism

The Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) representation model defines ontological constructs for information systems. According to these constructs the completeness and efficiency of a modeling technique can be defined. Ontology plays an essential role in e-commerce. Using or updating an existing ontology and providing tools to solve any semantic conflicts become essential steps before putting a system online. We use conceptual graphs (CGs) to implement ontologies. This paper evaluates CG capabilities using the BWW representation model. It finds out that CGs are ontologically complete according to Wand and Weber definition. Also it finds out that CGs have construct overload and construct redundancy which can undermine the ontological clarity of CGs. This leads us to build a meta-model to avoid some ontological-unclarity problems. We use some of the BWW constructs to build the meta-model. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Managing ontologies: A comparative study of ontology servers

An ontology is increasingly becoming an essential tool for solving problems in many research areas. The ontology is a complex information object. It can contain millions of concepts in complex relationships. When we want to manage complex information objects, we generally turn to information systems technology. An information system intended to manage ontology is called an ontology server. The ontology server technology is at the time of writing quite immature. Therefore, this paper reviews and compares the main ontology servers that have been reported in the literatures. As a result, we point out several research questions related to server technology

OntoRama: Browsing RDF ontologies using a hyperbolic-style browser

This paper presents a Java-based hyperbolic-style browser designed to render RDF files as structured ontological maps. The program was motivated by the need to browse the content of a web-accessible ontology server: WEB KB-2. The ontology server contains descriptions of over 74,500 object types derived from the WordNet 1.7 lexical database and can be accessed using RDF syntax. Such a structure creates complications for hyperbolic-style displays. In WEB KB-2 there are 140 stable ontology link types and a hyperbolic display needs to filter and iconify the view so different link relations can be distinguished in multi-link views. Our browsing tool, OntoRama, is therefore motivated by two possibly interfering aims: the first to display up to 10 times the number of nodes in a hyperbolic-style view than using a conventional graphics display; secondly, to render the ontology with multiple links comprehensible in that view.

Extracting ontological concepts for tendering conceptual structures

It has been argued that beyond software engineering and process engineering, ontological engineering is the third capability needed if successful e-commerce is to be realized. In our experience of building an ontological-based tendering system, we face the problem of building an ontology. In this paper, we demonstrate how to build ontologies in the tendering domain. The ontology life cycle is identified. Extracting concepts from existing resources like on-line catalogs is described. We have reused electronic data interchange (EDI) to build conceptual structures in the tendering domain. An algorithm to extract abstract ontological concepts from these structures is proposed.

Document retrieval for e-mail search and discovery using Formal Concept Analysis

This paper discusses a document discovery tool based on Conceptual Clustering by Formal Concept Analysis. The program allows users to navigate e-mail using a visual lattice metaphor rather than a tree. It implements a virtual. le structure over e-mail where files and entire directories can appear in multiple positions. The content and shape of the lattice formed by the conceptual ontology can assist in e-mail discovery. The system described provides more flexibility in retrieving stored e-mails than what is normally available in e-mail clients. The paper discusses how conceptual ontologies can leverage traditional document retrieval systems and aid knowledge discovery in document collections.