We analyse the computational complexity of three problems in judgment
aggregation: (1) computing a collective judgment from a profile of individual
judgments (the winner determination problem); (2) deciding whether a given
agent can influence the outcome of a judgment aggregation procedure in her
favour by reporting insincere judgments (the strategic manipulation problem);
and (3) deciding whether a given judgment aggregation scenario is guaranteed to
result in a logically consistent outcome, independently from what the judgments
supplied by the individuals are (the problem of the safety of the agenda). We
provide results both for specific aggregation procedures (the quota rules, the
premise-based procedure, and a distance-based procedure) and for classes of
aggregation procedures characterised in terms of fundamental axioms
For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO)-aimed at providing foundations for all major conceptual modeling constructs. This ontology has led to the development of an Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling language dubbed OntoUML, reflecting the ontological micro-theories comprising UFO. Over the years, UFO and OntoUML have been successfully employed in a number of academic, industrial and governmental settings to create conceptual models in a variety of different domains. These experiences have pointed out to opportunities of improvement not only to the language itself but also to its underlying theory. In this paper, we take the first step in that direction by revising the theory of types in UFO in response to empirical evidence. The new version of this theory shows that many of the meta-types present in OntoUML (differentiating Kinds, Roles, Phases, Mixins, etc.) should be considered not as restricted to Substantial types but instead should be applied to model Endurant Types in general, including Relator types, Quality types and Mode types. We also contribute a formal characterization of this fragment of the theory, which is then used to advance a metamodel for OntoUML 2.0. Finally, we propose a computational support tool implementing this updated metamodel.
The problem of merging several ontologies has important applications in the Semantic Web, medical ontology engineering, and other domains where information from several distinct sources needs to be integrated in a coherent manner. We propose to view ontology merging as a problem of social choice, i.e., as a problem of aggregating the input of a set of individuals into an adequate collective decision. That is, we propose to view ontology merging as ontology aggregation. As a first step in this direction, we formulate several desirable properties for ontology aggregators, we identify the incompatibility of some of these properties, and we define and analyse several simple aggregation procedures. Our approach is closely related to work in judgment aggregation, but with the crucial difference that we adopt an open world assumption, by distinguishing between facts not included in an agent's ontology and facts explicitly negated in an agent's ontology.
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