Digital Commons Network^™

Ontological Inquiry In An Undergraduate Communication Course, William B. Strean

Turning Toward Being: The Journal of Ontological Inquiry in Education

This essay explores how ontological and somatic approaches were applied in an undergraduate communication course. Beginning by contrasting the assumptions of traditional knowledge and skills-based approaches with the shift to a focus on being within ontological methods, the author expands to show specifically how somatics informed the learning activities and students’ development in communication. After providing examples of the core content of public speaking and interpersonal communication and shares students’ learning and feedback, the author concludes by considering broader possibilities for ontological inquiry and transformative education.

Communicating Indirect Feelings: American Stories Of Indirect Experiences, Susan Hess Lawson

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The words people use to describe indirect human experiences and how narratives play a role are examined within qualitative research. The problem is that some people have difficulty communicating indirect experiences, and few studies have examined the issue. The purpose of this qualitative narrative research study was to examine how people who encountered indirect communication in their lived experiences can communicate the indirect experiences and messages they received. The theory guiding this study is the indirect communication theory as it relates to Communicating Indirect Feelings (CIF). The definition of CIF is how people attempt to communicate indirect feelings for shared …

Voice-Based Agents As Personified Things: Assimilation And Accommodation As Equilibration Of Doubt, Katrin Etzrodt, Sven Engesser

Human-Machine Communication

We aim to investigate the nature of doubt regarding voice-based agents by referring to Piaget’s ontological object–subject classification “thing” and “person,” its associated equilibration processes, and influential factors of the situation, the user, and the agent. In two online surveys, we asked 853 and 435 participants, ranging from 17 to 65 years of age, to assess Alexa and the Google Assistant. We discovered that only some people viewed voice-based agents as mere things, whereas the majority classified them into personified things. However, their classification is fragile and depends basically on the imputation of subject-like attributes of agency and mind to …

Message Journal, Issue 4: Design Politics What Are The Politics Of Your Design And What Is The Design Of Your Politics?, Peter Jones, Camilla Afanador-Llach, Anne Berry, Sarah Rutherford, John Calvelli, Kristen Coogan, James Dyer, Cathy Gale, Anne M. Giangiulio, Elizabeth Herrmann, Chae Ho Lee, Gwen Lettis, Pamela Napier, Adam De Eyto, Muireann Mcmahon, Omari Souza, Dave Wood

Message Graphic Communication Design Research

No abstract provided.

Ontological Boundaries Between Humans And Computers And The Implications For Human-Machine Communication, Andrea L. Guzman

Human-Machine Communication

In human-machine communication, people interact with a communication partner that is of a different ontological nature from themselves. This study examines how people conceptualize ontological differences between humans and computers and the implications of these differences for human-machine communication. Findings based on data from qualitative interviews with 73 U.S. adults regarding disembodied artificial intelligence (AI) technologies (voice-based AI assistants, automated-writing software) show that people differentiate between humans and computers based on origin of being, degree of autonomy, status as tool/tool-user, level of intelligence, emotional capabilities, and inherent flaws. In addition, these ontological boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred as technologies emulate …

An Integrated View Of Data: Application Of Knowledge Modeling To Data Management, Sung-Kwan Kim, Wenjun Wang

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Data management has become an important challenge. Good data management requires an effective approach to collecting, storing, and accessing data across the enterprise. In this paper, a knowledge modeling approach to data management is introduced with an emphasis on data requirements analysis. A knowledge model can provide a high-level view of organizational data by specifying the structure and relationships of the knowledge contents used in business processes. The proposed knowledge modeling approach is business process oriented and decision oriented. The description of the knowledge contents in the model is based on ontological specification. The model is comprised of five elements: …

Empathi: An Ontology For Emergency Managing And Planning About Hazard Crisis, Manas Gaur, Kaeedeh Shekarpour, Amelia Gyrard, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

In the domain of emergency management during hazard crises, having sufficient situational awareness information is critical. It requires capturing and integrating information from sources such as satellite images, local sensors and social media content generated by local people.
A bold obstacle to capturing, representing and integrating such heterogeneous and diverse information is lack of a proper ontology which properly conceptualizes this domain, aggregates and unifies datasets. Thus, in this paper, we introduce empathi ontology which conceptualizes the core concepts describing the domain of emergency managing and planning of hazard crises.
Although empathi has a coarse-grained view, it considers the necessary …

Staying With And Telling Different Stories: Toward A Theory Of Environmental Advocacy That Bridges The Scholarly And Political Selves, Michael Clay

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

As human agents, narratives allow us to make sense of the world. They weave together lived experiences into meaningful webs of understanding. One such web of understanding is the way we narratively make sense of our relationship with the environment in which we find ourselves. The aim of this project is take a closer look at how many current environmental narratives establish an understanding that places the human agent as superior to, and thus master of, the environment within that relationship. This project works to articulate different ways of changing those narratives so that the agency of non-human actants is …

The Queer Allure Of Digital Sociality, Benjamin Parrish Haber

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the resonance between queer sociality and emergent forms of digital communication. Drawing from queer theory and LGBTQ social histories, this dissertation charts the convergence of digital social modulation with the polyvalence, promiscuity, and mutability of queer sociality. A close analysis of the infrastructure and design of Facebook, Snapchat, Grindr, and other queered social media platforms demonstrates how digital capitalism’s desire for lifelong compulsive engagement is in part facilitated by an appropriation of the ongoingness of queer sexuality and relationality. In highlighting the key role of temporality, aesthetic, and affect in regulating the creation and circulation of digital …

Breach: Understanding The Mandatory Reporting Of Title Ix Violations As Pedagogy And Performance, Jacob G. Abraham

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how institutions generate, teach, and authorize normative performances through texts and/as pedagogical practices. Through an analysis of the University of South Florida’s mandatory reporting policy, training, and Title IX Incident Report Form, this project examines how institutions construct and privilege certain values, performances, and individuals as means of generating the legal compliance of the institution independent. These practices are valued independent of how such compliance enables and limits the relationship between students and teachers. I argue the University’s texts and pedagogical practices serve to substantiate, authorize, and perform the materialization of certain privileges and the normative standards …

Bodily Boundaries: Inflammatory Bowel Disease And Rhetorical Enactments Of Self, Molly Margaret Kessler

Theses and Dissertations

Chronic illnesses are seven of the 10 leading causes of death in the United States and the prevalence is rising. Of the many chronic illnesses, one group of diseases present particular concern and mystery—autoimmune diseases. These conditions manifest when a patient’s body attacks itself, causing a myriad of symptoms that often leave patients debilitated. Since 2013, I have been examining the contexts in which patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD)—one type of autoimmune disease—reconsider their bodily boundaries while managing new, challenging communication experiences. The results of this research are presented in my dissertation, Bodily Boundaries: Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Rhetorical …

Consensus In Anesthesia Handoff Reporting, Robin Lee Anselm

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Despite some improvement, no consensus exists to perfect quality in anesthesia handoff practice and policy. This quality improvement project was designed to assist a local anesthesia and perioperative workforce questioning the quality of its current handoff. Theories and models used to inform the project included the Inter-Professional Team Collaborative, Lewin's change theory, the continuous quality improvement theory, and the knowledge to action model. The communication assessment tool (CAT) functioned as a needs assessment yielding a gap in handoff practice of 25 participants. The CAT also served as the post project evaluation survey. The situation, background, assessment, and recommendation (SBAR) tool …

Choosing To Choose: The Impact Of Technology On Choice, Aaron J. Alford

Channels: Where Disciplines Meet

The development of modern technology has increasingly focused on efficiency over expression. Interfaces limit and scale down human choice and expression. Entertainment and communication now use interfaced technology for even basic human expression, artificially limiting the number of potential choices to the options presented by the interface. The logic of technology has become a totalizing phenomenon, bringing all areas of human life under it purview. According to Heidegger, Ellul, and Flusser, the result of this development is a different way of being-in-the-world for humans. The traditional man has been the constant in production and communication, which the medium and technology …

A Black Art: Ontology, Data, And The Tower Of Babel Problem, Andrew J. Iliadis

Open Access Dissertations

Computational ontologies are a new type of emerging scientific media (Smith, 2016) that process large quantities of heterogeneous data about portions of reality. Applied computational ontologies are used for semantically integrating (Heiler, 1995; Pileggi & Fernandez-Llatas, 2012) divergent data to represent reality and in so doing applied computational ontologies alter conceptions of materiality and produce new realities based on levels of informational granularity and abstraction (Floridi, 2011), resulting in a new type of informational ontology (Iliadis, 2013) the critical analysis of which requires new methods and frameworks. Currently, there is a lack of literature addressing the theoretical, social, and critical …

The Liberty Counsel's : An Ideographic Analysis, Daniel M. Chick

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Ideology is a powerful means of persuasion in contemporary audience appeals. Through the means of ideographic and fragmentary analyses provided by Michael Calvin McGee (1980, 1990) and Saindon (2008), I examine the rhetorical appeals made by the Liberty Counsel, an evangelical Christian organization, which provides legal counsel for cases regarding “religious liberty.” Through an ideographic and fragmentary analysis, I conclude that the Counsel utilizes the ideograph as a superseding means of denoting its ideology. Further, I argue that is the ideograph that represents the ontological nature of the organization’s philosophy and serves as the guiding principle for many of the …

Alternative Ontologies Of Number: Rethinking The Quantitative In Computational Culture, Elizabeth De Freitas, Ezekiel J. Dixon-Román, Patti Lather

Ezekiel J Dixon-Román

Phenomenology Redux: Doing Phenomenology, Becoming Phenomenological, Thomas A. Conklin

Organization Management Journal

This article revisits the phenomenological method with particular focus on how it is meaningful for me. The effort is to present this method as a personal journey that has evolved over 13 years and to illustrate how it might become a more accessible approach for meaning-making and serving others. This is partly accomplished by dethroning it from its lofty philosophical perch such that it is available for daily use by practitioners, educators, and researchers. Further accessibility is provided through the presentation of various examples in health care, higher education, and personal reflections on the experience of understanding and employing phenomenology. …

Advancing Data Reuse In Phyloinformatics Using An Ontology-Driven Semantic Web Approach, Maryam Panahiazar, Amit P. Sheth, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Rutger Vos, Jim Leebens-Mack

Kno.e.sis Publications

Phylogenetic analyses can resolve historical relationships among genes, organisms or higher taxa. Understanding such relationships can elucidate a wide range of biological phenomena, including, for example, the importance of gene and genome duplications in the evolution of gene function, the role of adaptation as a driver of diversification, or the evolutionary consequences of biogeographic shifts. Phyloinformaticists are developing data standards, databases and communication protocols (e.g. Application Programming Interfaces, APIs) to extend the accessibility of gene trees, species trees, and the metadata necessary to interpret these trees, thus enabling researchers across the life sciences to reuse phylogenetic knowledge. Specifically, Semantic Web …

A Hybrid Approach To Finding Relevant Social Media Content For Complex Domain Specific Information Needs, Delroy H. Cameron, Amit P. Sheth, Nishita Jaykumar, Gaurish Anand, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Gary Alan Smith

Kno.e.sis Publications

While contemporary semantic search systems offer to improve classical keyword-based search, they are not always adequate for complex, domain specific information needs. Some complex search situations require knowledge of both ontological concepts as well as 'intelligible constructs' not typically modeled in ontologies. Intelligible constructs convey essential information, which may be important to the holistic information needs of information seekers. Such constructs may include notions of intensity, frequency, interval, dosage, emotion, sentiment, equivalence, synonymy, negation, parts-of-speech, etc. However, few search systems utilize both structured background knowledge (ontologies) and the aforementioned knowledge for query interpretation in domain specific searches. Instead, there is …

Key Ingredients For Your Next Semantics Elevator Talk, Krzysztof Janowicz, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

2012 brought a major change to the semantics research community. Discussions on the use and benefits of semantic technologies are shifting away from the why to the how. Surprisingly this more in stakeholder interest is not accompanied by a more detailed understanding of what semantics research is about. Instead of blaming others for their (wrong) expectations, we need to learn how to emphasize the paradigm shift proposed by semantics research while abstracting from technical details and advocate the added value in a way that relates to the immediate needs of individual stakeholders without overselling. This paper highlights some of …

New Trends In Automatic Assessment: Ontology Matching, Maria Mitina, Patricia Magee, John Cardiff

Conference Papers

Instant individual feedback represents a result of assessment which allows for considerable improvements in both teaching and learning. In this paper we present the application of ontology matching techniques in automatic correction of students’ answers for SQL tests, which will provide teachers with instant feedback to facilitate manual correction and marking and which they can pass to the students. Students experience many problems learning SQL due to the necessity to memorise database schemas, unclear feedback from the database engine on the execution of the query, etc. The program environment utilising the described approach is designed to solve the abovementioned problems …

The Metaphysics Of Electronic Being, Michał Ostrowicki [Aka Sidey Myoo]

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Metaphysics of Electronic Being" Michał Ostrowicki discusses the electronic environment as a sphere of being. To this end, the notion of the "electronic sphere" is used as a subject of ontological analysis. Ostrowicki postulates that the problematics of the electronic sphere represents a part of ontology and designates it as "ontoelectronics." He makes a distinction made between an electronic image and an electronic being, thus indicating that they differ from each other in their existential status and thereby deny any metaphysical equivalence between the two. This distinction between an electronic image and an electronic being is …

Biomedical Ontologies For Parasite Research, Vinh Nguyen, Satya S. Sahoo, Priti Parikh, Todd Minning, Brent Weatherly, Flora Logan, Amit P. Sheth, Rick Tarleton

Kno.e.sis Publications

Trypanosoma cruzi is a protozoan parasite that causes Chagas disease or American trypanosomiasis, which is the leading cause of death in Latin America. The primary objective of this study is to create an ontology-driven information infrastructure to support parasite researchers in identifying gene knockout, vaccination, or drug targets for T. cruzi. This involves querying across multiple datasets from diverse sources, such as proteome, pathway, internal lab data, etc. that are often represented in heterogeneous formats. To address this, a multi-ontology parasite knowledge repository (PKR) is being created with an intuitive graphical query interface called Cuebee. The PKR is underpinned by …

Provenance Management In Parasite Research, Vinh Nguyen, Priti Parikh, Satya S. Sahoo, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

The objective of this research is to create a semantic problem solving environment (PSE) for human parasite Trypanosoma cruzi. As a part of the PSE, we are trying to manage provenance of the experiment data as it is generated. It requires to capture the provenance which is often collected through web forms used by biologists to input the information about experiments they conduct. We have created Parasite Experiment Ontology (PEO) that represents provenance information used in the project. We have modified the back end which processes the data gathered from biologists, generates RDF triples and serializes them into the triple …

An Ontological Representation Of Time Series Observations On The Semantic Sensor Web, Cory Andrew Henson, Holger Neuhaus, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Rajkumar Buyya

Kno.e.sis Publications

Time series observations are a common method of collecting sensor data. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) provides a standard representation for time series observations within the Observations and Measurements language, and therefore is in heavy use on the Sensor Web. By providing a common model, Observations and Measurements (O&M) facilitates syntax-level integration, but lacks the ability to facilitate semantic-level integration. This inability can cause problems with interoperability between disparate sensor networks that may have subtle variations in their sensing methods. An ontological representation of time series observations could provide a more expressive model and resolve problems …

A Framework To Support Spatial, Temporal And Thematic Analytics Over Semantic Web Data, Matthew Perry, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Spatial and temporal data are critical components in many applications. This is especially true in analytical applications ranging from scientific discovery to national security and criminal investigation. The analytical process often requires uncovering and analyzing complex thematic relationships between disparate people, places and events. Fundamentally new query operators based on the graph structure of Semantic Web data models, such as semantic associations, are proving useful for this purpose. However, these analysis mechanisms are primarily intended for thematic relationships. In this paper, we describe a framework built around the RDF data model for analysis of thematic, spatial and temporal relationships between …

Supporting Complex Thematic, Spatial And Temporal Queries Over Semantic Web Data, Matthew Perry, Amit P. Sheth, Farshad Hakimpour, Prateek Jain

Kno.e.sis Publications

Spatial and temporal data are critical components in many applications. This is especially true in analytical domains such as national security and criminal investigation. Often, the analytical process requires uncovering and analyzing complex thematic relationships between disparate people, places and events. Fundamentally new query operators based on the graph structure of Semantic Web data models, such as semantic associations, are proving useful for this purpose. However, these analysis mechanisms are primarily intended for thematic relationships. In this paper, we describe a framework built around the RDF metadata model for analysis of thematic, spatial and temporal relationships between named entities. We …

What, Where And When: Supporting Semantic, Spatial And Temporal Queries In A Dbms, Matthew Perry, Amit P. Sheth, Farshad Hakimpour, Prateek Jain

Kno.e.sis Publications

Spatial and temporal data are critical components in many applications. This is especially true in analytical domains such as national security and criminal investigation. The outcome of the analytical process in these applications often hinges on uncovering and analyzing complex relationships between disparate people, places and events. Fundamentally new query operators based on the graph structure of Semantic Web data models, such as semantic associations, are proving useful in these applications. However, these analysis mechanisms are primarily intended for thematic relationships. We describe a framework built around the RDF metadata model for analysis of thematic, spatial and temporal relationships between …

Active Semantic Electronic Medical Record, Amit P. Sheth, Sangeeta Agrawal, Jonathan Lathem, Nicole Oldham, H. Wingate, K. Gallagher

Kno.e.sis Publications

The healthcare industry is rapidly advancing towards the widespread use of electronic medical records systems to manage the increasingly large amount of patient data and reduce medical errors. In addition to patient data there is a large amount of data describing procedures, treatments, diagnoses, drugs, insurance plans, coverage, formularies and the relationships between these data sets. While practices have benefited from the use of EMRs, infusing these essential programs with rich domain knowledge and rules can greatly enhance their performance and ability to support clinical decisions. Active Semantic Electronic Medical Record (ASEMR) application discussed here uses Semantic Web technologies to …

Predicting Domain Specific Entities With Limited Background Knowledge, Christopher Thomas, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

This paper proposes a framework for automatic recognition of domain-specific entities from text, given limited background knowledge, e.g. in form of an ontology. The algorithm exploits several lightweight natural language processing techniques, such as tokenization and stemming, as well as statistical techniques, such as singular value decomposition (SVD) to suggest domain relatedness of unknown entities.