Creation and merging of ontology top-levels

We provide a new method for systematically structuring the top-down level of ontologies. It is based on an interactive, top-down knowledge acquisition process, which assures that the knowledge engineer considers all possible cases while avoiding redundant acquisition. The method is suited especially for creating/merging the top part(s) of the ontologies, where high accuracy is required, and for supporting the merging of two (or more) ontologies on that level.

The Courseware Watchdog: an ontology-based tool for finding and organizing learning material

Topics in education are changing with an ever faster pace. E-Learning resources tend to be more and more decentralised. Users need increasingly to be able to use the resources of the web. For this, they should have tools for finding and organizing information in a decentral way. In this, paper, we show how an ontology-based tool suite allows to make the most of the resources available on the web.

Ontology merging with formal concept analysis

Ontologies have been established for knowledge sharing and are widely used as a means for conceptually structuring domains of interest. With the growing usage of ontologies, the problem of overlapping knowledge in a common domain becomes critical. In this short paper, we address two methods for merging ontologies based on Formal Concept Analysis: FCA-Merge and ONTEX. --- FCA-Merge is a method for merging ontologies following a bottom-up approach which offers a structural description of the merging process. The method is guided by application-specific instances of the given source ontologies. We apply techniques from natural language processing and formal concept analysis to derive a lattice of concepts as a structural result of FCA-Merge. The generated result is then explored and transformed into the merged ontology with human interaction. --- ONTEX is a method for systematically structuring the top-down level of ontologies. It is based on an interactive, top-down- knowledge acquisition process, which assures that the knowledge engineer considers all possible cases while avoiding redundant acquisition. The method is suited especially for creating/merging the top part(s) of the ontologies, where high accuracy is required, and for supporting the merging of two (or more) ontologies on that level.

An Experimental Investigation into ‘Pledge and Review’ in Climate Negotiations

A novelty of the new Paris Agreement is the inclusion of a process for assessment and review of countries’ nationally determined pledges and contributions. The intent is to reveal whether similar countries are making comparable pledges, whether the totality of such pledges will achieve the global goal, and whether, over the coming years, the contributions actually made by countries will equal or exceed their pledges. The intent is also to provide an opportunity for countries to express their approval, or disapproval, of the pledges and contributions made by individual countries. Here we report the results of a lab experiment on the effects of such a process in a game in which players choose a group target, declare their individual pledges, and then make voluntary contributions to supply a public good. Our results show that a review process is more likely to affect targets and pledges than actual contributions. Even when a review process increases average contributions, the effect is relatively small. As the window for achieving the 2 °C goal will close soon, our results suggest that, rather than merely implement the Paris Agreement, negotiators should begin now to develop complementary approaches to limiting emissions, including the adoption of agreements that are designed differently than the one adopted in Paris.