Since Edmund Husserl coined the term "Formal Ontologies" in the early 20th century, a field that identifies itself with this particular branch of sciences has gained increasing attention. Many authors, and even Husserl himself have developed what they claim to be formal ontologies. I argue that under close inspection, none of these so claimed formal ontologies are truly formal in the Husserlian sense. More concretely, I demonstrate that they violate the two most important notions of formal ontology as developed in Husserl's Logical Investigations, namely a priori validity independent of perception and formalism as the total absence of content. I hence propose repositioning the work previously understood as formal ontology as the foundational ontology it really is. This is to recognize the potential of a truly formal ontology in the Husserlian sense. Specifically, I argue that formal ontology following his conditions, allows us to formulate ontological structures, which could capture what is more objectively without presupposing a particular framework arising from perception. I further argue that the ability to design the formal structure deliberately allows us to create highly scalable and interoperable information artifacts. As concrete evidence, I showcase that a class of formal ontology, which uses the axioms of vector spaces, is able to express most of the conceptualizations found in foundational ontologies. Most importantly, I argue that many information systems, specifically artificial intelligence, are likely already using some type of vector ontologies to represent reality in their internal worldviews and elaborate on the evidence that humans do as well. I hence propose a thorough investigation of the ability of vector ontologies to act as a human-machine interoperable ontological framework that allows us to understand highly sophisticated machines and machines to understand us.

We argue that logical semantics might have faltered due to its failure in distinguishing between two fundamentally very different types of concepts: ontological concepts, that should be types in a strongly-typed ontology, and logical concepts, that are predicates corresponding to properties of and relations between objects of various ontological types. We will then show that accounting for these differences amounts to the integration of lexical and compositional semantics in one coherent framework, and to an embedding in our logical semantics of a strongly-typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it in ordinary language. We will show that in such a framework a number of challenges in natural language semantics can be adequately and systematically treated.

Requirement volatility is an issue in software engineering in general, and in Web-based clinical applications in particular, which often originates from an incomplete knowledge of the domain of interest. With advances in the health science, many features and functionalities need to be added to, or removed from, existing software applications in the biomedical domain. At the same time, the increasing complexity of biomedical systems makes them more difficult to understand, and consequently it is more difficult to define their requirements, which contributes considerably to their volatility. In this paper, we present a novel agentbased approach for analyzing and managing volatile and dynamic requirements in an ontology-driven laboratory information management system (LIMS) designed for Web-based case reporting in medical mycology. The proposed framework is empowered with ontologies and formalized using category theory to provide a deep and common understanding of the 1 functional and nonfunctional requirement hierarchies and their interrelations, and to trace the effects of a change on the conceptual framework. Keywords: LIMS, requirement volatility, requirement change management, ontology, category theory, intelligent agents 1. Introduction The life sciences constitute a challenging domain in knowledge representation. Biological data are highly dynamic, and bioinformatics applications are large and there are complex interrelationships between their elements with various levels of interpretation for each concept. In an ideal situation, the requirements for a software system should be completely and unambiguously determined before design, coding, and testing take place. The complexity of bioinformatics applications and their constant evolution lead to frequent changes in their requirements: often new requirements are added and existing requirements are modified or deleted, causing parts of the software system to be redesigned, deleted, or added. Such changes lead to volatility in the requirements of bioinformatics applications. In this paper, we deal with an important problem of requirements volatility in the context of an ontology-driven clinical laboratory information management system (LIMS)[1, 2].

Over two decades ago a "quite revolution" overwhelmingly replaced knowledgebased approaches in natural language processing (NLP) by quantitative (e.g., statistical, corpus-based, machine learning) methods. Although it is our firm belief that purely quantitative approaches cannot be the only paradigm for NLP, dissatisfaction with purely engineering approaches to the construction of large knowledge bases for NLP are somewhat justified. In this paper we hope to demonstrate that both trends are partly misguided and that the time has come to enrich logical semantics with an ontological structure that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about in ordinary language. In this paper it will be demonstrated that assuming such an ontological structure a number of challenges in the semantics of natural language (e.g., metonymy, intensionality, copredication, nominal compounds, etc.) can be properly and uniformly addressed.

In this note we suggest that difficulties encountered in natural language semantics are, for the most part, due to the use of mere symbol manipulation systems that are devoid of any content. In such systems, where there is hardly any link with our common-sense view of the world, and it is quite difficult to envision how one can formally account for the considerable amount of content that is often implicit, but almost never explicitly stated in our everyday discourse. The solution, in our opinion, is a compositional semantics grounded in an ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it in ordinary language. In the compositional logic we envision there are ontological (or first-intension) concepts, and logical (or second-intension) concepts, and where the ontological concepts include not only Davidsonian events, but other abstract objects as well (e.g., states, processes, properties, activities, attributes, etc.) It will be demonstrated here that in such a framework, a number of challenges in the semantics of natural language (e.g., metonymy, intensionality, metaphor, etc.) can be properly and uniformly addressed.

We argue for a compositional semantics grounded in a strongly typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it in ordinary language. Assuming the existence of such a structure, we show that the semantics of various natural language phenomena may become nearly trivial.

We argue for a compositional semantics grounded in a strongly typed ontology that reflects our commonsense view of the world and the way we talk about it. Assuming such a structure we show that the semantics of various natural language phenomena may become nearly trivial.

In Logic and Ontology Cocchiarella (2001) convincingly argues for a view of "logic as a language" in contrast with the (now dominant) view of "logic as a calculus". In the latter, logic is viewed as an "abstract calculus that has no content of its own, and which depends on set theory as a background framework by which such a calculus might be syntactically described and semantically interpreted." In the view of "logic as a language", however, logic has content, and "ontological content in particular." Moreover, and according to Cocchiarella, a logic with ontological content necessitates the use of type theory (and predication), as opposed to set theory (and set membership), as the background framework. An obvious question that immediately comes to mind here is the following: what exactly is the nature of this strongly-typed ontological structure that will form the background framework for a new logic that has content?