Antony Galton

This introduction to logic as it applies to information technology is written specifically from the point of view of computer science students. The author's approach adheres to imparting the canonical logic theories--propositional calculus and first-order predicate calculus. The text first introduces a wide range of general logic concepts that are applicable to any variety of logic, followed by detailed clear exposition of the propositional and predicate calculuses and their proof theories. Different methods of validating propositional inferences, as well as the means of determining the adequacy of such methods, are discussed. Algorithmic aspects are stressed, as is the deductive character of logic. The author takes pains throughout the text to eradicate a number of common confusions and misunderstandings, including those between the material conditional (if/then) and logical implication; between syntactical and semantical consequence relations (deducibility vs entailment); and between Use and Mention. All variables used in the predicate calculus are bound by quantifiers, thus avoiding the cumbersome use of variable assignments.

Logic for Information Technology

This book is a contribution to the emerging discipline of Qualitative Spatial Information Theory. This theory will cover time, space, objects in space, their spatial attributes, changes in those attributes, and the temporal structure of those changes. Each of these topics is covered separately in this book, and a theory of qualitative spaces as partitions of quantitative spaces is developed in detail and applied to numerous particular cases.

Qualitative Spatial Change

Riichiro Mizoguchi

Ontology began life in ancient times as a fundamental part of philosophical enquiry concerned with the analysis and categorisation of what exists. In recent years, the subject has taken a practical turn with the advent of complex computerised information systems which are reliant on robust and coherent representations of their subject matter. The systematisation and elaboration of such representations and their associated reasoning techniques constitute the modern discipline of formal ontology, which is now being applied to such diverse domains as artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, bioinformatics, GIS, knowledge engineering, information retrieval and the Semantic Web. Researchers in all these areas are becoming increasingly aware of the need for serious engagement with ontology, understood as a general theory of the types of entities and relations making up their respective domains of enquiry, to provide a solid foundation for their work. The conference series Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS) provides a meeting point for researchers from these and other disciplines with an interest in formal ontology, where both theoretical issues and concrete applications can be explored in a spirit of genuine interdisciplinarity. This volume contains the proceedings of the sixth FOIS conference, held in Toronto, Canada, during 11-14 May 2010, including invited talks by Francis Jeffry Pelletier, John Bateman, and Alan Rector and the 28 peer-reviewed submissions selected for presentation at the conference, ranging from foundational issues to more application-oriented topics.

Antony Galton

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