E Pluribus Unum - Computational Creativity Research: Towards Creative Machines - page 174

the ontology for in OWL Manchester Syntax. The ontology is a fragment

introducing several concepts necessary for understanding the basic meaning of the
term 'house', including that it is an artefact that has the capability of serving as a
residence for people and is generally located on a plot of land. The precise formal-
isation is not criterial at this point; any adequate ontological description of 'house'
would, however, need to provide similar distinctions. 9
ontology base1 =
Class :Artifact

house

[...] Class : Agent

end

ontology base2 =
Class :Artifact [...] Class : Person

Class : Object Class : Site

end
As discussed above, finding candidate base ontologies and base morphisms is
a non-trivial task. For the purpose of this example, we create them manually. The
purpose of the example is to show how the DOL specifications naturally allow us
to express these kinds of 're-mappings' of relations and entities that are required
when considering blends in general. The base ontologies used for the two blends
discussed here are both quite simple, they mostly introduce shared concepts and
contain only weak axiomatisations. The second base ontology only differs from the
first by replacing the class Agent by Person and two additional classes, namely
Object and Site .
The blending of boat and house to houseboat is achieved by turning the boat into
a habitat and moving the house from a plot of land to a body of water. This can be
represented by two interpretations boat_habitable and house_floating .
interpretation boat_habitable : base2 to Boat =
Object

ₒ

Boat ,

ₒ

Site BodyOfWater

interpretation house_floating : base2 to House=
Object ₒ House,
Site ₒ Plot
The base ontologies and the interpretations above provide the necessary
ingredients for a blending of boat and house to Houseboat . The syntax of dia-

grams is
network D = O 1 ,..., O m , M 1 ,..., M n , A 1 ,..., A k , D 1 ,..., D l
where the O i are ontologies, the M i are morphisms, the A i are alignments and the
D i are existing diagrams. The syntax of combinations is
combine O 1

,..., O m , M 1 ,..., M n , A 1 ,..., A k , D 1 ,..., D l

9 In the examples, note that concepts such as 'ArtifactThatExecutesResidenceFunction' are auxiliary
symbols that are needed because of limitations of theManchester Syntax being used, which does not
allow the use of complex concepts on the left-hand side of subsumption statements. The ontology
for boat is axiomatised similarly, it can be found at http://www.ontohub.org/conceptportal .