Contextual ontology

Primas uses this argument to introduce the notion of contextual ontology, which refers to emergent properties arising from hidden features of the independent reality. This permits a clear view of the relation between contextual and fundamental theories, and also a generalization that is relevant for philosophy of science at large ... 

Only if we maintain multiple sets of contextual ontologies, we can tolerate the coexistence of complementary views in our experience of reality. While an independent reality itself is directly inaccessible, the numerous inequivalent contextual descriptions allow us to get deeper insight into the structure of independent reality (Primas, 1998). 

This chapter introduces three recent advances to the state-of-the-art, extending the abilities of attribute correspondences. Contextual attribute correspondences associate selection conditions with attribute correspondences. Semantic matching extends attribute correspondences to be specified in terms of ontological relationship. Finally, probabilistic attribute correspondences extend attribute correspondences by generating multiple possible models, modeling uncertainty about which one is correct by using probability theory. 

An additional use of ontologies, related to text mining, is for information captured in a semantically normalized fashion. Ontologies also provide contextualization of information. For instance, they can directly represent the fact that Rafis a protein-tyrosine kinase AND is an enzyme found in humans. They can also be used as the foundation for semantically normalized multirelational databases that can act as knowledge stores. 

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