Positive Illusions and New Venture Creation: Conceptual Issues and An Empirical Illustration

This paper discusses the nature and role of positive illusions in the exploitation of new ideas and innovation leading to the development of new enterprises and industries. Positive illusions imply misperceptions of oneself and the environment that can lead to faulty investments and bankruptcies. However, without the optimistic misperceptions of one's own abilities and opportunities that positive illusions imply, little or nothing would happen. Thus, illusions that lead to initiative and commitment are crucial to create and exploit new innovations, even though venturing into new business areas always involves risk and potential failure. We discuss how entrepreneurs, public authorities, and the media might influence such illusions to stimulate innovative initiatives, as well as how entrepreneurs can adjust their misperceptions to avoid negative consequences without killing initiative. The paper is primarily conceptual and draws on insights from literatures such as cognitive psychology, strategy, management, and entrepreneurship. In our discussion we also utilise examples from blue mussel farming, which represents a potentially important innovation within the Norwegian aquaculture industry.     

EPISTEMIC PERSPECTIVE—ACT—PARADIGM

The paper is conceived as an introductory part of a larger unit. An ontology is proposed, based on three fundamental concepts: epistemic perspective, act, and paradigm (in T. Kuhn's sense of this term). Therefore, the point of departure is Kuhn's philosophy of science and some kind of ontology involved. The common denominator of considerations presented in this paper may be called a systems approach or systems spirit. In the author's view, the “doctrinal choice,” which appears in general systems theory, arguing either that general systems, as they are, really exist (Bertalanffy, Boulding, Rapoport, Mesarovic), or that only isomorphic systemic objects exist really (Laszlo, Bunge, Sadovsky), may be avoided. This doctrinal choice is a counterpart of the ancient problem of universals in philosophy (i.e. nominalism vs. essentialism). The problem of existence, one of the fundamental questions in philosophy, was reduced (or rather replaced) by the problem of point of view (epistemic perspective), or—strictly speaking—question, if epistemic perspective may be considered as an entity having autonomic ontological status, i.e. independent of the knowing subject. The concept of “act” was borrowed from phenomenology, as it appears in writings of E. Husserl (“Ideas I”) and some of his philosophical descendants (e.g. M. Merleau-Ponty, and R. Ingarden).     

Towards Ontology Generation from Tables

At the heart of today's information-explosion problems are issues involving semantics, mutual understanding, concept matching, and interoperability. Ontologies and the Semantic Web are offered as a potential solution, but creating ontologies for real-world knowledge is nontrivial. If we could automate the process, we could significantly improve our chances of making the Semantic Web a reality. While understanding natural language is difficult, tables and other structured information make it easier to interpret new items and relations. In this paper we introduce an approach to generating ontologies based on table analysis. We thus call our approach TANGO (Table ANalysis for Generating Ontologies). Based on conceptual modeling extraction techniques, TANGO attempts to (i) understand a table's structure and conceptual content; (ii) discover the constraints that hold between concepts extracted from the table; (iii) match the recognized concepts with ones from a more general specification of related concepts; and (iv) merge the resulting structure with other similar knowledge representations. TANGO is thus a formalized method of processing the format and content of tables that can serve to incrementally build a relevant reusable conceptual ontology.     

Taking Style On Board (or how to get used to the idea of creative adaptors and uncreative innovators)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential impact of Kirton's Adaption-Innovation Theory on our thinking about creativity, and consequently on the practices of researchers and trainers in this field. That people differ in their degree or level of creativity has long been established. Kirton's work asserts that people also differ in the manner in which they express their creativity—their style, and the KAI (the Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory) measures a person's preferred style. In the literature, Style and Level of creativity are argued (and mostly shown) to be independent. It follows from this that Adaptors and Innovators are creative (and uncreative) in different ways. It is suggested that much of the work in the creativity field has focused on the Innovative style of creativity. This paper describes research identifying differences in how Adaptors and Innovators view their creative products, looks at some possible implications for training, explores differences in preferred organisational climate between Adaptors and Innovators, and suggests a style-neutral definition of creativity.     

Ontological emergence scheme in self-organized and emerging systems

This paper presents the concept of “Ontological Emergence”, a process that seeks to adapt an ontology to the changes and new components in a self-organized and emergent system, through the application of a set of rules that allows the emergence of a new conceptualization (emerging concepts). The Ontological Emergence provides the structuration of the information and knowledge that could be generated in the system, creating conceptual models that can adequately represent the new behavior that is emerging. It arises from the need to represent ontologically a conceptualization of a reality that is dynamic, which cannot be pre-defined or pre-determined, in order to generate emerging knowledge models that follows the scalability and the evolution of it. In that sense, in this paper is proposed an “Ontological Emergence Scheme” based on a set of processes of registration, monitoring, analysis and adaptation of the various conceptual models that interact in the system, as well as on some processing rules in regard to requirements and information of the context, in order to allow the ontological emergence. In this proposal scheme, the Meta-ontologies guide the ontological emergence process through the definition of general categories, to facilitate the integration of concepts from different ontologies or data sources. Finally, the paper presents some case studies, showing its utility in self-organized and emergent systems.     

Rethinking the cross-cultural interaction architecture

The paper is an exploration for a conceptual framework for cross-cultural interfacing. The roots of this exploration lie in my personal, functional, social and cultural experiences, and cross-cultural encounters. These encounters in many ways reflect the networking journey of AI & Society, promoting and stimulating the human-centred debate in cross-cultural settings. As a ‘cross-cultural holon’, AI & Society has been questioning the given orthodoxy of the ‘one best way’ and the culture of the ‘exact language’ since its inception 21 years ago. My observation is that even though we now live in a world of multimodal interactive media technologies, some how the interface design has not moved much beyond the functional (observed reality) worldview of our interactions. Even at the functional level, the design perspective remains bounded by the observed reality. It is thus no surprise that when it comes to designing interaction technologies for social and cultural domains such as health care, work, employment, life long learning, the design mainly hovers around the functional skill training, mechanical feedback and objectified evaluation. When we move beyond the functional worldview, and explore our interactions within social and cultural domains, we encounter both the reality (objectified world) and actuality (experienced world) of interactions. At this level, the challenge of the interface is not just coping with the interaction spaces of reality and actuality but also with the ‘in-between’ space of actuality–reality gaps. We explore how the concept of symbiosis enables the interaction in the gaps between actuality and reality, how the concept of the ‘culture of the artificial enables the sharing and pooling experiences, how the concept of valorisation’ enables to find a coherence (commonality) between interactions, and how the concept of cultural holon is used to conceptualise the network architecture of cross-cultural interactions. It is proposed that the way forward to designing cross-cultural interfaces is to first seek a conceptual framework for cross-cultural interaction spaces, and then use this framework to design interfacing systems and tools.     

The effect of computer science on physics learning in a computational science environment

College and high-school students face many difficulties when dealing with physics formulas, such as a lack of understanding of their components or of the physical relationships between the two sides of a formula. To overcome these difficulties some instructors suggest combining simulations' design while learning physics, claiming that the programming process forces the students to understand the physical mechanism activating the simulation. This study took place in a computational-science course where high-school students programmed simulations of physical systems, thus combining computer science (CS) and mathematics with physics learning. The study explored the ways in which CS affected the students' conceptual understanding of the physics behind formulas. The major part of the analysis process was qualitative, although some quantitative analysis was applied as well. Findings revealed that a great amount of the time was invested by the students on representing their physics knowledge in terms of computer science. Three knowledge domains were found to be applied: structural, procedural and systemic. A fourth domain which enabled reflection on the knowledge was found as well, the domain of execution. Each of the domains was found to promote the emergence of knowledge integration processes (Linn & Eylon, 2006, 2011), thus promoting students’ physics conceptual understanding. Based on these findings, some instructional implications are discussed.     

DOLCE ergo SUMO: On foundational and domain models in the SmartWeb Integrated Ontology (SWIntO)

Increased availability of mobile computing, such as personal digital assistants (PDAs), creates the potential for constant and intelligent access to up-to-date, integrated and detailed information from the Web, regardless of one's actual geographical position. Intelligent question-answering requires the representation of knowledge from various domains, such as the navigational and discourse context of the user, potential user questions, the information provided by Web services and so on, for example in the form of ontologies. Within the context of the SmartWeb project, we have developed a number of domain-specific ontologies that are relevant for mobile and intelligent user interfaces to open-domain question-answering and information services on the Web. To integrate the various domain-specific ontologies, we have developed a foundational ontology, the SmartSUMO ontology, on the basis of the DOLCE and SUMO ontologies. This allows us to combine all the developed ontologies into a single SmartWeb Integrated Ontology (SWIntO) having a common modeling basis with conceptual clarity and the provision of ontology design patterns for modeling consistency. In this paper, we present SWIntO, describe the design choices we made in its construction, illustrate the use of the ontology through a number of applications, and discuss some of the lessons learned from our experiences.     

An Ontology-Based Approach to Metaphor Cognitive Computation

Language understanding is one of the most important characteristics for human beings. As a pervasive phenomenon in natural language, metaphor is not only an essential thinking approach, but also an ingredient in human conceptual system. Many of our ways of thinking and experiences are virtually represented metaphorically. With the development of the cognitive research on metaphor, it is urgent to formulate a computational model for metaphor understanding based on the cognitive mechanism, especially with the view to promoting natural language understanding. Many works have been done in pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, especially the discussions on metaphor understanding process in pragmatics and metaphor mapping representation in cognitive linguistics. In this paper, a theoretical framework for metaphor understanding based on the embodied mechanism of concept inquiry is proposed. Based on this framework, ontology is introduced as the knowledge representation method in metaphor understanding, and metaphor mapping is formulated as ontology mapping. In line with the conceptual blending theory, a revised conceptual blending framework is presented by adding a lexical ontology and context as the fifth mental space, and a metaphor mapping algorithm is proposed.     

Walking Through Cantor's Paradise and Escher's Garden: Epistemological Reflections on the Mathematical Infinite (I)

Infinity is not an easy concept. A number of difficulties that people cope with when dealing with problems related to infinity include its abstract nature: understanding of infinity as a never-ending process, understanding infinity as a set of an infinite number of elements, and understanding some well-known paradoxes. Infinity can be understood in a number of ways, some of which are incompatible, and can involve value judgments or assumptions that are neither explicit nor desired. In its definition, we distinguish several aspects, teleological, artistic (Escher 2000 Escher, M. C. Estampas y dibujos. Colonia: Ed. Taschen, 2000. (In Spanish). [Google Scholar]), some essential, some potential, and others actual. Cantor's work on set theory is linked to infinity and has implications for belief in God.     

On the belief in avatars: what on earth have the aesthetics of the Byzantine icons to do with the avatar in social technologies?

This article looks at the digital portrait used in the form of avatars in various online worlds and communication networks. It describes an ongoing modal shift from an ontological understanding of the portrait towards the portrait as performative acting.

In accordance with the Western semiotic divide between representational fiction and material reality proper, the avatar-portrait is often still described as a representation that depicts the subject on the basis of a conceptual segregation between the living subject and the portrait. But the avatar-portrait functions as embodiment, thereby fulfilling a mainly performative purpose that triggers the participant's belief in the other's avatar.

The paper looks at Eastern iconology, where the iconic portrait is an energetic transmitter in which the depiction and the depicted converge in the belief in the realness of the picture. Key concepts such as prototype, archetype and inverse perspective are discussed and applied to the art piece Can You See Me Now? by Blast Theory.     

Illusions of control and social domination strategies in knowledge mapping system use

In recent years, the overload of information has driven companies to develop visualization technologies as a way to graphically represent knowledge for decision making. On the basis of visualization technologies and on knowledge modeling techniques, knowledge maps (Kmaps) help represent the knowledge assets of a company as graphical discrete objects. Yet such systems, because of their visual representation of knowledge, are prone to creating illusions. Using a case study of three firms’ use of Kmaps in their Human Resource departments and drawing upon Bourdieu's social theory, illusion of control theory, and IS as signal and symbol theory, our study provides a critical perspective on the use of Kmaps by groups of actors to reinforce their social domination in business organizations. We find that Kmap use can lead to illusions of knowledge control and illusions of executive control and that in response to the potential for knowledge illusions, three social domination strategies – a signal and symbol strategy, an avoidance strategy and an evidence strategy – are employed. Implications of these results on Knowledge Management and Information Systems Management future research are discussed.     

面向语义Web的描述逻辑本体构建

随着计算机技术和网络技术的不断发展,网络信息技术已经成了人们生活中不可分割的一部分,但是,如何构建一个更加科学合理的描述逻辑本体,方便人们在数以万计的网络信息中快速、高效的找出所需要的信息和资源是当前世界范围内的迫切性问题。该文就面向语义Web的描述逻辑本体的构建做相关的讨论和研究,希望为我国网络技术中的本体构建技术问题提供一些借鉴和参考。     

Towards a Machine of a Process (MOP) ontology to facilitate e-commerce of industrial machinery

Adapting to user's requirements is a key factor for enterprise success. Despite the existence of several approaches that point in this direction, simplifying integration and interoperability among users, suppliers and the enterprise during product lifecycle, is still an open issue. Ontologies have been used in some manufacturing applications and they promise to be a valid approach to model manufacturing resources of enterprises (e.g. machinery and raw material). Nevertheless, in this domain, most of the ontologies have been developed following methodologies based on development from scratch, thus ontologies previously developed have been discarded. Such ontological methodologies tend to hold the interoperability issues in some level. In this paper, a method that integrates ontology reuse with ontology validation and learning is presented. An upper (top-level) ontology for manufacturing was used as a reference to evaluate and to improve specific domain ontology. The evaluation procedure was based on the systemic methodology for ontology learning (SMOL). As a result of the application of SMOL, an ontology entitled Machine of a Process (MOP) was developed. The terminology included in MOP was validated by means of a text mining procedure called Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF–IDF) which was carried out on documents from the domain in this study. Competency questions were performed on preexisting domain ontologies and MOP, proving that this new ontology has a performance better than the domain ontologies used as seed.     

Constructing ontologies by mining deep semantics from XML Schemas and XML instance documents

With the development of the Semantic Web and Artificial Intelligence techniques, ontology has become a very powerful way of representing not only knowledge but also their semantics. Therefore, how to construct ontologies from existing data sources has become an important research topic. In this paper, an approach for constructing ontologies by mining deep semantics from eXtensible Markup Language (XML) Schemas (including XML Schema 1.0 and XML Schema 1.1) and XML instance documents is proposed. Given an XML Schema and its corresponding XML instance document, 34 rules are first defined to mine deep semantics from the XML Schema. The mined semantics is formally stored in an intermediate conceptual model and then is used to generate an ontology at the conceptual level. Further, an ontology population approach at the instance level based on the XML instance document is proposed. Now, a complete ontology is formed. Also, some corresponding core algorithms are provided. Finally, a prototype system is implemented, which can automatically generate ontologies from XML Schemas and populate ontologies from XML instance documents. The paper also classifies and summarizes the existing work and makes a detailed comparison. Case studies on real XML data sets verify the effectiveness of the approach.     

Algebraic semantics for natural language: some philosophy, some applications

Information processing, when performed by an intelligent agent, draws on a wide array of knowledge sources. Among them are world knowledge, situation knowledge, conceptual knowledge and linguistic knowledge. The focus in this paper will be on the semantic knowledge which is part of the general linguistic competence of any speaker of a natural language (NL).In particular, this knowledge contains ways of organizing the linguistic ontology, i.e. the collection of heterogeneous entities that make up the domain of discourse. The representation language that is proposed here to model this knowledge stresses the structural properties of the ontology. This approach has been persued under the name of algebraic semantics.The paper starts out by explaining the term "algebraic semantics" as it is used in logic. Two senses of "algebraic" are distinguished that are called here "conceptual" and "structural". These two senses of the algebraic method are then applied to NL semantics. The conceptual part is realized by the method of structuring the domains of linguistic ontology in various ways. Thus plural entities are recognized along with mass entities and events. The common outlook here is mereological or lattice-theoretical. Some applications to the study of plurals are given that are to show the usefulness of the algebraic approach. Finally, the ontology of plurals is addressed, and comments are made on some relevant discussion of mereology in recent philosophical work. In sum, it is contended that the algebraic perspective while being of interest in semantics and philosophy proper, also fits both the spirit and the practice of much work that has been done in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) field of knowledge representation.     

基于形式概念的语义网本体的构建与展现

作为语义网基础的本体是共享概念模型的明确的形式化规范说明,它提供一种让计算机可以交换、搜寻和认同文字信息的方式。有效地构建、展现本体成为应用本体的关键问题,然而,现有构建本体的各种方法都在不同方面存在着限制。经过分析比较,本文采用形式概念分析理论构造本体阶层来弥补缺陷,并结合机率模式展现本体,用于表达概念之间及概念、资料间的相关性,利用文件与概念的相关性排序结果,以便于用户找到最相关的信息,从而有效地提高了信息查找的效率。本文通过实例来演示本体的构造与表达。