The 11th edition of Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine welcomes Anthony Fauci to its editorial staff, in addition to more than 85 new contributors. While the organization of the book is similar to previous editions, major emphasis has been placed on disorders that affect multiple organ systems. Important advances in genetics, immunology, and oncology are emphasized. Many chapters of the book have been rewritten and describe major advances in internal medicine. Subjects that received only a paragraph or two of attention in previous editions are now covered in entire chapters. Among the chapters that have been extensively revised are the chapters on infections in the compromised host, on skin rashes in infections, on many of the viral infections, including cytomegalovirus and Epstein-Barr virus, on sexually transmitted diseases, on diabetes mellitus, on disorders of bone and mineral metabolism, and on lymphadenopathy and splenomegaly. The major revisions in these chapters and many

Harrison's Principles of Internal Medicine

In this provocative book, Barwise and Perry tackle the slippery subject of \"meaning, \" a subject that has long vexed linguists, language philosophers, and logicians.

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Situations and Attitudes.

A prevalent and pervasive view of designing is that it can be modeled using variables and decisions made about what values should be taken by these variables. The activity of designing is carried out with the expectation that the designed artifact will operate in the natural world and the social world. These worlds impose constraints on the variables and their values; so, design could be described as a goal-oriented, constrained, decision- making activity. However, design distinguish- es itself from other similarly described activities not only by its domain but also by additional necessary features. Designing involves exploration, exploring what variables might be appropriate. The process of explo- ration involves both goal variables and deci- sion variables. In addition, designing involves learning: Part of the exploration activity is learning about emerging features as a design proceeds. Finally, design activity occurs within two contexts: the context within which the designer operates and the context produced by the developing design itself. The designer’s perception of what the context is affects the implication of the context on the design. The context shifts as the designer’s perceptions change. Design activity can be now characterized as a goal-oriented, con- strained, decision-making, exploration, and learning activity that operates within a con- text that depends on the designer’s percep- tion of the context.

Design Prototypes: A Knowledge Representation Schema for Design

[서평]「The Unified Modeling Language User Guide」

Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics. By A. Tarski. Translated by J. H. Woodger. Pp. 471. 60s. 1956. (Clarendon Press)

The current chapter presents an overview about the current stage of the foundational ontology GFO. GFO (General Formal Ontology). GFO is a foundational ontology integrating objects and processes. It is being developed by the research group Onto-Med (Ontologies in Medicine) at the University of Leipzig. Unique selling properties of GFO are the following: it includes categories of objects (3D objects) as well as of processes (4D entities) and both are integrated into one coherent framework. GFO presents a multi-categorial approach by admitting universals, concepts, and symbol structures and their interrelations. GFO adopts categories pertaining to levels of reality, and it is designed to support interoperability by principles of ontological mapping and reduction. GFO contains several novel ontological modules, in particular, a module for functions and a module for roles. GFO is designed for applications, firstly in medical, biological, and biomedical areas, but also in the fields of economics and sociology.

General Formal Ontology (GFO): A Foundational Ontology for Conceptual Modelling

This report is a living document of the Research Group Ontologies in Medicine (Onto-Med) which represents work in progress towards a proposal for an integrated system of foundational ontologies. It will be applied to several fields of medicine, biomedicine, and biology, and a number of applications are carried out in collaboration with the Center for Clinical Trials at the University of Leipzig, with the MaxPlanck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and with the ICCAS at the University of Leipzig. The General Formal Ontology (GFO) is a component of the Integrated System of Foundational Ontologies (ISFO), and ISFO is a part of the Integrated Framework for the Development and Application of Ontologies (IFDAO). The predecessor of IFDAO was the GOL project which was launched in 1999 as a collaborative research effort of the Institute of Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology (IMISE) and the Institute of Informatics (IfI) at the University of Leipzig.

General Formal Ontology (GFO) - A Foundational Ontology Integrating Objects and Processes [Version 1.0]

As pointed out in the pioneering work of [WSW99, EW01], an upper level ontology allows to evaluate the ontological correctness of a conceptual model and to develop guidelines how the constructs of a conceptual modeling language should be used. In this paper we adopt the General Ontological Language (GOL), proposed in [DHHS01], for this purpose. We discuss a number of issues that arise when applying the concepts of GOL to UML class diagrams as a conceptual modeling language. We also compare our ontological analysis of some parts of the UML with the one proposed in [EW01].

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On the General Ontological Foundations of Conceptual Modeling

Every domain-specific ontology must use as a framework some upper-level ontology which describes the most general, domain-independent categories of reality. In the present paper we sketch a new type of upper-level ontology, which is intended to be the basis of a knowledge modelling language GOL (for: 'General Ontological Language'). It turns out that the upper-level ontology underlying standard modelling languages such as KIF, F-Logic and CycL is restricted to the ontology of sets. Set theory has considerable mathematical power and great flexibility as a framework for modelling different sorts of structures. At the same time it has the disadvantage that sets are abstract entities (entities existing outside the realm of time, space and causality), and thus a set-theoretical framework should be supplemented by some other machinery if it is to support applications in the ripe, messy world of concrete objects. In the present paper we partition the entities of the real world into sets and urelements, and then we introduce several new ontological relations between these urelements. In contrast to standard modelling and representation formalisms, the concepts of GOL provide a machinery for representing and analysing such ontologically basic relations.

GOL: toward an axiomatized upper-level ontology

General Ontological Language (GOL) is a formal framework for representing and building ontologies. The purpose of GOL is to provide a system of top-level ontologies which can be used as a basis for building domain-specific ontologies. The present paper gives an overview about the basic categories of the GOL-ontology. GOL is part of the work of the research group Ontologies in Medicine (Onto-Med) at the University of Leipzig which is based on collaborative work of the Institute of Medical Informatics(IMISE) and the Institute for Computer Science (IfI). It represents work in progress toward a proposal for an integrated family of top-level ontologies and will be applied to several fields of medicine, in particular to the field of Clinical Trials.

Heinrich Herre

Papers

General Formal Ontology (GFO): A Foundational Ontology for Conceptual Modelling

General Formal Ontology (GFO) - A Foundational Ontology Integrating Objects and Processes [Version 1.0]

On the General Ontological Foundations of Conceptual Modeling

GOL: toward an axiomatized upper-level ontology

Ontological Categories in GOL