We are surrounded by collective phenomena, with examples existing on many levels of granularity. Despite our frequent experiences of such phenomena they seem to have been largely ignored within the field of ontology. In this paper, existing ontologies are examined to determine the extent to which they can adequately represent collective phenomena, and are found wanting in a number of important respects. An adequate representation of collective phenomena must do justice to the often subtle relationship that exists between a collective viewed as a whole and its constitution as a plurality of individual participants. An important prerequisite for this is to determine the range of variation that exists within the broad class of collectives. Numerous examples of collective phenomena have been studied to extract appropriate classification criteria. The results from this study are used to produce a new typology of collectives which is intended to establish a basis for the adequate treatment of collectives within an ontology. To illustrate the classification system we show how it can be used to highlight the significant distinctions between a suitably diverse range of examples. The paper concludes with a set of further research questions that have been raised during the development of the taxonomy. Z. Wood and A. Galton / A taxonomy of collective phenomena Z. Wood and A. Galton / A taxonomy of collective phenomena269 phenomena (Bottazzi et al., 2006). Although each ontology is found to possess some tools and relations that allow them to model features of collective phenomena, they are found wanting in many areas. DOLCEPart of the WonderWeb Foundational Ontologies Library, DOLCE (Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering) has been developed to represent a very general domain. Limited to particulars, DOLCE tries to capture the 'ontological categories' that underlie human common sense, thereby giving it a cognitive bias (Masolo et al., 2003). However, even though collectives surely are particulars, and feature largely in our common-sense understanding of the world, there is little support for them in DOLCE (Bottazzi et al., 2006).A number of relations defined in DOLCE could be used to help represent collective phenomena. 'Parthood' and 'temporary parthood' could be used to indicate when an individual is a member of a collective. If an individual is only a member for a short time, for example, an individual in a queue, this could be indicated using the 'temporary parthood' relation.In everyday language, we often say that a member participates in a collective. In DOLCE, however, participation is defined as a relation between endurants and perdurants; only if, counter-intuitively, collectives were to be identified as perdurants, could the DOLCE 'participates' relation be used to express the relation between an entity and a collective of which it is a member. That this might not always be absurd is suggested by the notion of a 'dynamic collective' (Galton, 2005), which is a collective phenomenon such as a pr...

Abstract. Expressions designating collectives, such as "the committee" or "the ships in the port", may be interpreted de re or de dicto, depending on context, according as they pick out collectives defined by their members or collectives defined by some criterion for membership. We call these E(xtensional)-collectives and I(ntensional)-collectives respectively, and in this paper we explore in depth the relationship between these two categories. In particular, we identify important respects in which they differ, regarding the nature of the dependence of the collective on its members, the nature of the parthood relation in which the members stand to the whole, and, from an application perspective, the different methods used for identifying the two forms of collective from large spatio-temporal data-sets.

Digitally enhanced advanced services (DEAS), offered currently by various industries, could be a challenging concept to comprehend for potential clients. This could result in limited interest in adopting (DEAS) or even understanding its true value with significant financial implications for the providers. Innovative ways to present and simplify complex information are provided by serious games and gamification, which simplify and engage users with intricate information in an enjoyable manner. Despite the use of serious games and gamification in other areas, only a few examples have been documented to convey servitization offers. This research explores the design and development of a serious game for the Howden Group, a real-world industry partner aiming to simplify and convey existing service agreement packages. The system was developed under the consultation of a focus group comprising five members of the industrial partner. The final system was evaluated by 30 participants from engineering and servitization disciplines who volunteered to test online the proposed system and discuss their user experience (UX) and future application requirements. The analysis of users’ feedback presented encouraging results, with 90% confirming that they understood the DEAS concept and offers. To conclude, the paper presents a tentative plan for future work which will address the issues highlighted by users’ feedback and enhance the positive aspects of similar applications.

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