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International Conference on Conceptual Modeling

ER 2017: Conceptual Modeling pp 520–534Cite as

Teleologies: Objects, Actions and Functions

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10650))

Abstract

We start from the observation that the notion of concept, as it is used in perception, is distinct and different from the notion of concept, as it is used in knowledge representation. In earlier work we called the first notion, substance concept and the second, classification concept. In this paper we integrate these two notions into a general theory of concepts that organizes them into a hierarchy of increasing abstraction from what is perceived. Thus, at the first level, we have objects (which roughly correspond to substance concepts), which represent what is perceived (e.g., a car); at the second level we have actions, which represent how objects change in time (e.g., move); while, at the third level, we have functions (which roughly correspond to classification concepts), which represent the expected behavior of objects as it is manifested in terms of “an object performing a certain set of actions” (e.g., a vehicle). The main outcome is the notion of Teleology, where teleologies provide the basis for a solution to the problem of the integration of perception and reasoning and, more in general, to the problem of managing the diversity of knowledge.

This work has been supported by QROWD (http://qrowd-project.eu), a Horizon 2020 project, under Grant Agreement No. 732194.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The word teleology builds on the Greek words telos (meaning “end, purpose”) and logia, (meaning “a branch of learning”).

  2. 2.

    The word ontology builds on the Greek words ont (meaning “being”) and logia, (meaning “a branch of learning”).

  3. 3.

    The concepts we use are also largely influenced by our language, culture, history, place where we live, and many other contextual factors, see, e.g., [10].

  4. 4.

    Interestingly enough, the ancient Latin word for world is mundus, meaning “clean, elegant”, itself a translation of the Greek word cosmos, meaning “orderly arrangement”.

  5. 5.

    A general formalization of this intuition, not provided here for lack of space, will be provided in a follow-up paper and will be based on the work described in [16], which provides a formalization of the problem of theory transformation in terms of abstraction operators.

  6. 6.

    http://schema.org/Car .

  7. 7.

    https://auto.schema.org/Motorcycle .

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI), University of Trento, Via Sommarive 9, 38123, Povo, Trento, Italy

    Fausto Giunchiglia & Mattia Fumagalli

Authors
  1. Fausto Giunchiglia
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  2. Mattia Fumagalli
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mattia Fumagalli .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria

    Heinrich C. Mayr

  2. Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bozen-Bolzano, Italy

    Giancarlo Guizzardi

  3. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

    Hui Ma

  4. Valencia University of Technology, Valencia, Spain

    Oscar Pastor

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Giunchiglia, F., Fumagalli, M. (2017). Teleologies: Objects, Actions and Functions. In: Mayr, H., Guizzardi, G., Ma, H., Pastor, O. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10650. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69904-2_39

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69904-2_39

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-69903-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-69904-2

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