Bøger i Ifsr International Systems Sci serien

In 1978, when the book Living Systems was published, it contained the prediction that the sciences that were concerned with the biological and social sciences would, in the future, be stated as rigorously as the "hard sciences" that study such nonliving phenomena as temperature, distance, and the interaction of chemical elements. Principles of Quantitative Living Systems Science, the first of a planned series of three books, begins an attempt to fulfill that prediction. The view that living things are similar to other parts of the physical world, differing only in their complexity, was explicitly stated in the early years of the twentieth century by the biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy. His ideas could not be published until the end of the war in Europe in the 1940s. Von Bertalanffy was strongly opposed to vitalism, the theory current among biologists at the time that life could only be explained by recourse to a "vital principle" or God. He c- sidered living things to be a part of the natural order, "systems" like atoms and molecules and planetary systems. Systems were described as being made up of a number of interrelated and interdependent parts, but because of the interrelations, the total system became more than the sum of those parts. These ideas led to the development of systems movements, in both Europe and the United States, that included not only biologists but scientists in other fields as well. Systems societies were formed on both continents.

This book examines key issues in designing semantics-oriented natural language (NL) processing systems. One of the key features is an original strategy for transforming the existing World Wide Web into a new generation Semantic Web (SW-2) and the basic formal tools for its realization, which are proposed. The principal distinguishing feature of the proposed SW-2 is the well-developed ability of NL processing. A broad conceptual framework for describing structured meanings of NL-texts (sentences and arbitrarily complex discourses) is obtained by introducing a mathematical model describing 10 interrelated partial operations on conceptual structures. A new class of formal languages called standard knowledge languages (SK-languages) is defined. Readers will gain knowledge of these languages and learn a way of building semantic representations using them. Additionally, a broadly applicable mathematical model of a linguistic database is constructed. A useful for practice and strongly structured multi-lingual algorithm of semantic-syntactic analysis of NL-texts is described by means of original formal concepts; the input texts can be sentences in English, Russian, and German.With extensive use of examples and illustrations to clarify complex material and demonstrate practical applications, many historical and bibliographical notes, end-of-chapter exercises, and glossaries, this book can serve as a graduate-level textbook, as well as a good reference for researchers and practitioners who deal with the various problems involving semantics of natural language texts, ontologies, Semantic Web, semantic data integration in e-science, and content languages in multi-agent systems, in particular, in e-commerce and e-health.