Same or different?Abstract relational concept use in juvenile bamboo sharks and Malawi cichlids

Sorting objects and events into categories and concepts is an important cognitive prerequisite that spares an individual the learning of every object or situation encountered in its daily life.Accordingly,specific items are classified in general groups that allow fast responses to novel situations.The present study assessed whether bamboo sharks Chiloscyllium griseum and Malawi cichlids Pseudotropheus zebra can distinguish sets of stimuli(each stimulus consisting of two abstract,geometric objects)that meet two conceptual preconditions,i.e.,(1)"sameness"versus"difference"and(2)a certain spatial arrangement of both objects.In two alternative forced choice experiments,individuals were first trained to choose two different,vertically arranged objects from two different but horizontally arranged ones.Pair discriminations were followed by extensive transfer test experiments.Transfer tests using stimuli consisting of(a)black and gray circles and(b)squares with novel geometric patterns provided conflicting information with respect to the learnt rule"choose two different,vertically arranged objects",thereby investigating(1)the individuals'ability to transfer previously gained knowledge to novel stimuli and(2)the abstract relational concept(s)or rule(s)applied to categorize these novel objects.Present results suggest that the level of processing and usage of both abstract concepts differed considerably between bamboo sharks and Malawi cichlids.Bamboo sharks seemed to combine both concepts-although not with equal but hierarchical prominence-pointing to advanced cognitive capabilities.Conversely,Malawi cichlids had difficulties in discriminating between symbols and failed to apply the acquired training knowledge on new sets of geometric and,in particular,gray-level transfer stimuli.

KnowID:An Architecture for Efficient Knowledge-Driven Information and Data Access

Modern information systems require the orchestration of ontologies,conceptual data modeling techniques,and efficient data management so as to provide a means for better informed decision-making and to keep up with new requirements in organizational needs.A major question in delivering such systems,is which components to design and put together to make up the required“knowledge to data”pipeline,as each component and process has trade-offs.In this paper,we introduce a new knowledge-to-data architecture,KnowID.It pulls together both recently proposed components and we add novel transformation rules between Enhanced Entity-Relationship(EER)and the Abstract Relational Model to complete the pipeline.KnowID’s main distinctive architectural features,compared to other ontology-based data access approaches,are that runtime use can avail of the closed world assumption commonly used in information systems and of full SQL augmented with path queries.