Designing engineers
Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies - Special issue: the role of formal ontology in the information technology
Function and behavior representation in conceptual mechanical design
Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing
Special Issue: Engineering applications of representations of function, Part 1
Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing
Representing function: Relating functional representation and functional modeling research streams
Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing
A review of function modeling: Approaches and applications
Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing
The model of roles within an ontology development tool: Hozo
Applied Ontology - Roles, an interdisciplinary perspective
A formal ontological perspective on the behaviors and functions of technical artifacts
Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing
Deployment of an ontological framework of functional design knowledge
Advanced Engineering Informatics
FBRL: a function and behavior representation language
IJCAI'95 Proceedings of the 14th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2
Ontological Analysis of Functional Decomposition
Proceedings of the 2009 conference on New Trends in Software Methodologies, Tools and Techniques: Proceedings of the Eighth SoMeT_09
Characterizing Functions based on Ontological Models from an Engineering Point of View
Proceedings of the 2010 conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference (FOIS 2010)
Hi-index | 0.00 |
In this paper we argue that the challenge of the formalization of functions not merely consists of analyzing and formalizing yet another concept; the challenge may also consist of formalizing a concept that is to be taken as a family resemblance concept in the Wittgensteinian sense. We focus on engineering for giving this argument and indicate briefly how the argument can also be given for biological functions. We demonstrate that in engineering there are a number of different meanings attached to the term “function”, and observe that engineers moreover seem to hold that having all these meanings is useful in their field. This observation make plausible that function indeed is to be taken as a family resemblance concept. Then we describe three strategies for the formalization of functions - the revisionary, the overarching and the descriptive strategies - and relate them to a number of the current proposals for this formalization. Assessing the strategies with the meta-ontological goals for formalizations of adequacy and minimality, we argue that if function indeed is to be taken as a family resemblance concept, then the descriptive strategy is to be preferred.