ISAO 2016 Ontology Pub Quiz

The quiz was held at the International School for Applied Ontology 2016, in Bolzano, Italy. Take note that most questions were tailored to the topics of the lectures and a few questions and answers turned out to be debatable; they have not been changed here but presented as-is. Questions were provided by multiple contributors (see acknowledgements at the end).
Instructions for this HTML version: toggle 'Answer' to show/hide the answer. It is also available as ppt, which was used for the pub quiz at ISAO 2016 (in full screen mode).

The rules:

A team may choose the question number among the questions that have not passed the revue yet. (in theory, but for practical reasons, it was done in order at JOWO17)
A team has at most 1 minute to answer that question.
If a team does not know the answer and did not try to answer the question, the question goes to another team immediately. (the next one, at JOWO17)
Note: The level of difficulty of the questions varies quite a lot.
Another note: the multiple requests for more silly questions was honoured.

There are 42 questions.

1.	In terms of computational complexity, what is the principal difference between first order predicate logic and a description logic? [Answer]
	Answer: DLs are decidable fragments of FOL
2.	Who proposed mereology about a century ago, and may be considered the 'father' of mereology? [Answer]
	Answer: Stanislaw Lesniewski
3.	Fill in the blank. Ollie's Macbook Air : Macbook Air IAOA : ____? [Answer]
	Answer: Organisation. Basically: an instance 'stands to' class/concept/universal
4.	What are in the corners of Ogden's semiotic triangle? [Answer]
	Answer: sign/symbol, thought/reference/concept, and thing/referent
5.	In which year was OWL standardised? [Answer]
	Answer: 2004
6.	Which foundational/top-level ontology is used most often for ontologies in biology? DOLCE BFO YAMATO GIST [Answer]
	Answer: BFO
7.	Consider parthood in mereology. Which of the following is NOT a mereological parthood? Katniss' heart is part of Katniss' body Swallowing is part of eatings Clay is part of a vase South Tyrol is part of Italy [Answer]
	Answer: Clay is part of a vase correct relation: constitution
8.	Which one is the odd one out, and why? Proton Neutron Electron Chronon [Answer]
	Answer: Chronon The other three are physical objects, whereas chronon is the smallest timeslice (used in several temporal logics)
9.	Which one is a foundational/top-level ontology? YATLO AWO OFU GFO [Answer]
	Answer: GFO. YATLO [yet another top level ontology] is made-up, AWO is a tutorial ontology, OFU has the letters in the wrong order (UFO is the name)
10.	What is the year of publication of Leonard and Goodman's "Calculus of Individuals" [Answer]
	Answer: 1940
11.	If parthood is interpreted as set inclusion, what is the set-theoretic relation corresponding to overlap? [Answer]
	Answer: Intersection
12.	Does the mereological principle of strong supplementation imply the extensionality of parthood? [Answer]
	Answer: yes
13.	Who introduced the term "gunk" to refer to a domain in which everything can be divided for ever into smaller and smaller parts? [Answer]
	Answer: David Lewis. (In: Parts of Classes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991))
14.	Given the principle of unique unrestricted composition (to the effect that every plurality of things has a unique fusion), which of the following additional principles will suffice to yield a complete axiomatization of classical mereology? antisymmetry of part transitivity of part weak supplementation [Answer]
	Answer: weak supplementation
15.	What is the definition of qua-object? [Answer]
	Answer: in the character (or role) of. There are several more comprehensive descriptions, summarised neatly here: http://www.philosophie.ch/philipp/teaching/metaphysics10/handout12.pdf
16.	Who's the author of "Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization"? Kevin Mulligan John Searle Barry Smith [Answer]
	Answer: John Searle
17.	When was the earliest published occurrence of the word "ontology"? [Answer]
	Answer: 1606, in Jacob Lorhard "Ogdoas Scholastica"
18.	In what sense, if any, could Paleontology be considered a branch of Ontology? [Answer]
	Answer: It deals with, amongst other things, the classification and identification of extinct species. So one could argue yes because of the classification aspects and describing things. Or no, because they're extinct (realist, prescriptive etc.)
19.	Is a tornado an object, a process, or an event? [Answer]
	Answer: It could be any of these depending on the point of view from which it is described - lots of scope for interesting discussion there!
20.	What does RCC stand for? [Answer]
	Answer: Region Connection Calculus
21.	Sets have members as their most basic constituents. What is the counterpart to that in mereology? [Answer]
	Answer: Atom
22.	What are the two core temporal constructs or operators from which others--such as 'some time in the future', 'at all times', and 'the previous instant'--can be defined? ? [Answer]
	Answer: The Since and Until operators
23.	Which of the following relation(s) really do require a temporal modality to represent its meaning fully? x precedes y x is derived from y x is an immutable part of y x participates in y [Answer]
	Answer: 1-3. Immutable part too: x is an essential part of y for as long as it is an instance of X. Participation not necessarily, though it could have some duration added to it.
24.	Which of the following one(s) is(are) OWL 2 profile(s)? OWL 2 Full OWL 2 EL OWL 2 TL OWL 2 DL [Answer]
	Answer: OWL 2 EL. OWL 2 DL is the most expressive DL-based OWL species, so not a profile. OWL 2 Full is even more expressive. "TL" is made-up (though that abbreviation is would be in line with QL and RL naming)
25.	Which DL reasoner 'revolutionised' (substantially improved performance of) automated reasoning over DL knowledge bases in the 1990s? [Answer]
	Answer: FaCT
26.	You want the automated reasoner to deduce that your mother's sister is your aunt. Which language feature do you need for that? [Answer]
	Answer: OWL 2's property chains, or, more generally: role composition.
27.	You need to represent in an ontology the concept land-locked country (e.g., Switzerland, Lesotho). Which theory (logic and/or Ontology) will help you do that? [Answer]
	Answer: (mereo)topology
28.	According to which foundational ontology is Death an achievement? [Answer]
	Answer: DOLCE
29.	What is the difference between meronymy and mereology? [Answer]
	Answer: meronymy refers to 'part' in natural language phrases, mereology in Ontology meronymy, the part-of relation making up the hierarchies called meronomies or partonomies, bears on linguistic terms (hence the "nymy" suffix) denoting classes, as for hyperonymy in taxonomies, while in mereology the part-of relation bears on individuals.
30.	Is the Ontology Quiz a continuant, an occurrent, both, or neither? [Answer]
	Answer: depends.. (i) The quiz qua collection of questions to be answered, which is a continuant; (ii) The actual event on Wednesday evening when the questions are posed and people attempt to answer them, which is an occurrent.
31.	What is DOL? [Answer]
	Answer: The Distributed Ontology, Model and Specification Language
32.	Can an identity criterion be based on the identification of an essential part? [Answer]
	Answer: no, unless the essential part comes with a clear identity criterion itself. Identity criteria are based on properties, not the on the identity of other entities on the pain of regression.
33.	What is the proper term in ontology of those objects that in natural language are generally referred to with mass nouns? [Answer]
	Answer: stuff, amount of matter That is, those uncountables, or only countable in quantities; e.g., gold, water, mayonnaise, beer
34.	What is the complexity of reasoning in ALC with respect to a TBox? ExpTime PSpace NP [Answer]
	Answer: ExpTime. Reasoning w.r.t. TBox is ExpTime-complete. (It would be PSpace in case of an empty Tbox)
35.	What is the Description Logic reasoning service useful for to generate a Taxonomy in an Ontology: Query Answering Concept Subsumption Instance Checking [Answer]
	Answer: Concept Subsumption
36.	DLs have sound and complete reasoning/inference algorithms. Why is this an important feature? No wrong inferences are drawn. All the correct inferences are drawn. Both 1. and 2. holds [Answer]
	Answer: 3. indeed: Is true for a Sound algorithm, and Holds for complete algorithms.
37.	What is the main reason for the success of the DL-Lite fragments when using them to build Ontologies? Reasoning in DL-Lite is computationally tractable. Query answering is reducible to DBMS technology. They have a small number of constructors. [Answer]
	Answer: 2. indeed query answering over a DL-Lite ontology is FO-rewritable (i.e., it is AC0 in Data complexity as for DBMS queries).
38.	The notion of Certain Answer differs from that one of a query in a DBMS setting because: We need to deal with incomplete information. We need to deal with complete information. We need to make sure that the answer in certainly in the DBMS. [Answer]
	Answer: 1. Indeed, certain answer are those ones that hold in ALL possible models of the Knowledge Base (i.e., an incomplete DB + a set of constraints)
39.	Did the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR -- East Germany) and the Bundesrepublik Deutschland (FDR -- West Germany) share a border between 1949 and 1990? [Answer]
	Answer: NO, because the Bundesrepublik Deutschland never officially recognized the DDR border. So, the border between the DDR and the FDR was established and declared unilaterally by the DDR.
40.	Since when does Germany exist? Since 18 January 1871 when, at teh Versailles palace, Prices of the German states gathered there to proclaim Wilhelm I of Prussia as German Emperor after the French captiulation in the Franco-Prussian war. Since the Treaty of Verdun in 843, when the Carolingian Empire was divided into three parts, and the Eastern Part became known as the kingdom of Germany. Since the first Century CE, when Julius Ceasar used the term Germania to designate the tribes North of the Alps. [Answer]
	Answer: Any of the above, depending on your criteria of what "Germany" is.
41.	Which of the options below contains a list of UN member states, which are not recognized as sovereign states by at least one UN member? Republic of China, Armenia, Palestine South Korea, Armenia, Israel Israel, Kosovo, Palestine South Korea, Kosovo, South Ossetia [Answer]
	Answer: South Korea is not recognized by North Korea, which is a UN member. Armenia is not recognized by Pakistan. Israeal is not recognized by 48 UN member states. Kosovo, Palestine and South Ossetia are not UN members.
42.	Do mountains exist? Yes, because humans refer to landforms such as "Mont Blanc" and "Mount Everest" in their discourse and everyday conversation. No, because all mathematical representations of terrain do not need the concept of a "mountain". It depends on the definition of "exist". [Answer]
	Answer: Mountains may be necessary concepts of a human description of landforms, but are not required in computer representations of terrain.

Acknowledgements:
The questions have been set by (in order of number of questions provided): Maria Keet, Achille Varzi, Antony Galton, Alessandro Artale, Gilberto Camara, Laure Vieu, and Roberta Ferrario.

Homepage of Maria Keet

ISAO 2016 Ontology Pub Quiz