This work aims at advancing the scientific understanding of the real property processes stimulating the Belarusian property market specifically in order to promote its development. For a property market to operate efficiently, real properties ought to be able to be smoothly created and securely transferred with the aid of real property processes. These processes, after being implemented, generate transaction costs for a society, while the ways by which they are arranged can increase or decrease such costs. This research applies institutions as a theoretical ground with the transaction costs theory as a core concept for the examination of the selected property processes, resulting in a body of new knowledge on the relations between institutions, property processes and transaction costs. This study specifically investigates property formation and purchase processes in Slovenia, Sweden and Belarus through an ontological modelling supported by their descriptions. It additionally explores the content of property rights along with the existing real property legislation of the selected countries, as such are recognised as components influencing real property processes. Consequently, general descriptions of the land tenure systems of these three countries and a classification of fundamental property rights are presented. The examined property processes are compared in order to identify differences and thereby generally enrich the theoretical knowledge in the land administration domain. This comparison is based on the transaction costs generated by the specific real property processes and relatively estimated by this research with a focus on the stakeholders involved, their functions and interactions. This study places its main emphasis on property formation and property purchase processes in Belarus, while corresponding property processes of selected European countries are taken as benchmarks for new approaches. This research results in proposing simplified property processes for Belarus that may sensibly be established with the long-term aim of facilitating the functioning of the national property market and thereby economising as to transaction costs. In conclusion, the property market of Belarus would benefit from a simplification of the real property processes by utilising international practices while, however, not disregarding national peculiarities. / QC 20120525

The purpose of this study was to investigate preservice science teachers&rsquo / mental models about the role and distribution of ozone layer and ozone layer depletion regarding their ontological orientation. This study was conducted with twenty four preservice science teachers who were enrolled in Elementary Science Education Program of Education Faculty of one public university located in Central Anatolia. From each grade level six preservice science teachers were selected / two from low achiever, two from middle achiever and two from high achiever. Moreover, in the study, data were collected by using semi structured interview and interview consists of eleven questions and with five questions having multiple parts. Interview recordings were transcribed and analyzed qualitatively. In the following steps of the analysis, researcher proceeded with the already formed and described codes in an easygoing way. The results revealed that preservice science teachers&rsquo / responses were mostly seen as skin cancer and sunburn as harmful effects of ultraviolet rays and preservice science teachers&rsquo / responses were mostly seen as activation vitamin D and photosynthesis of plants as beneficial effects of Sun&rsquo / s rays. Half of preservice science teachers thought that ozone layer exists in the atmosphere. Moreover, preservice science teachers&rsquo / responses were mostly seen as perfume, deodorant, car, and spray as harmful materials to ozone layer. Chlorofluorocarbon, carbon monoxide, and carbon-dioxide were the most seen responses as harmful chemicals to ozone layer. Similar misconceptions were identified when compared with past studies. Also, different misconceptions were found in the study. Ten distinct models were formed regarding role and distribution of ozone layer and five distinct models were formed regarding ozone layer depletion. Moreover, absorbing and reflecting surface was mostly seen ontological belief regarding role and distribution of ozone layer. Hole was mostly seen ontological belief regarding ozone layer depletion. Generally, achievement and grade level did not make difference among preservice science teachers forming which type of mental models and having ontological beliefs.

The growth of the Church in Africa, namely at numerical level 1 is tremendous. However, we notice that her impact on society and public life is not so visible as the growth is, since Christian values are embodied by Christians. Yet, the Church has huge human resources1 pastors, missionaries, lay leaders and theologians. The challenge for the Church in Africa is to incarnate and inculturate these values and the living message of the Gospel. In this thesis we question the co-operation between the Church and mission agencies, between native pastors and western missionaries. We notice that since 150 years, there has been a huge gap between these two entities. This is due to the fact that Theology and Missiology look like two lines that never meet. This situation leads us to revisit not only the current paradigm Church-Mission but also the current link between Theology and Missiology. We propose the following theses: 1. Theology is mission-centered. The goal of Theology is to extend the Kingdom of God by the prodamatlon of the Gospel so that every nation (ethne) may be represented in the Kingdom, and by the communication of Christian values so that a new society or a new civilisation may emerge and may take over the current and corrupted society. 2. To explore the Biblical data on Church and Mission, the only ontological approach appears to be limited, therefore the functional approach must be added. The right question is not only “What the Church Is" but also "For what the Church Is" 3. The local Church is the representation of the Universal Church in a given location. This local church is culturally rooted. Cultural plurality is a sine qua non condition for the Universal Church. 4. The local Church is the basis of mission. The basic reflections on mission must take place within the local Church, at the grass root level. All human resources, from mission agencies and para-church organisation are accountable to the local Church. 5. The major themes of healing, liberation and identity are at the core of the Gospel. Theologians must articulate these themes in their discourse. 6. Co-operation between local Churches, or within a duster of local Churches, gives opportunities to succeed in term of mission since no local Church can do mission alone.

Subjects designated by the neologism 'disability' typically experience various forms of marginality, discrimination and inequality. The response by social scientists and professionals engaged in social policy and service delivery has been to combat the 'disability problem' by way of implementing anti-discrimination protections and various other compensatory initiatives. More recently, with the development of biological and techno-sciences such as 'new genetics', nanotechnologies and cyborgs the solution to 'disability' management has been in the form of utilizing technologies of early detection, eradication or at best, technologies of mitigation. Contemporary discourses of disablement displace and disconnect discussion away from the 'heart of the problem', namely, matters ontological. Disability - based marginality is assumed to emerge from a set of pre-existing conditions (i.e. in the case of biomedicalisation, deficiency inheres in the individual, whilst in the Social Model disablement is created by a capitalist superstructure). The Great Divide takes an alternative approach to studying 'the problem of disability' by proposing that the neologism 'disability' is in fact created by and used to generate notions and epistemologies of 'ableism'. Whilst epistemologies of disablement are well researched, there is a paucity of research related to the workings of ableism. The focal concerns of The Great Divide relate to matters of ordering, disorder and constitutional compartmentalization between the normal and pathological and the ways that discourses about wholeness, health, enhancement and perfection produce notions of impairment. A central argument of this dissertation figures the production of disability as part of the tussle over ordering, emerging from a desire to create order from an assumed disorder; resulting in a flimsy but often unconvincing attempt to shore up so-called optimal ontologies and disperse outlaw ontologies. The Great Divide examines ways 'disability' rubs up against, mingles with and provokes other seemingly unrelated concepts such as wellness, ableness, perfection, competency, causation, productivity and use value. The scaffolding of the dissertation directs the reader to selected sites that produce epistemologies of disability and ableism, namely the writing of 'history' and Judeo-Christian renderings of Disability. It explores the nuances of ableism (including a case study of wrongful life torts in law) and the phenomenon of internalized ableism as experienced by many disabled people. The study of liberalism and the government of government are explored in terms of enumeration, the science of 'counting cripples' and the battles over defining 'disability' in law and social policy. Additionally another axis of ableism is explored through the study of a number of perfecting technologies and the way in which these technologies mediate what it means to be 'human' (normalcy), morphs/simulates 'normalcy' and the leakiness of 'disability'. This analysis charts the invention of forearms transplantation (a la Clint Hallam), the Cochlear implant and transhumanism. The Great Divide concludes with an inversion of the ableist gaze(s) by proposing an ethic of affirmation, a desiring ontology of impairment.

L’interrogation efficace d’images en utilisant un système de recherche d’image est un problème qui a attiré l’attention de la communauté de recherche depuis une longue période. Dans le domaine médical, les images sont de plus en plus produites en grandes quantités en raison de leur intérêt croissant pour de nombreuses pratiques médicales comme le diagnostic, la rédaction de rapports et l’enseignement. Cette thèse propose un système d’annotation et recherche sémantique d’images gastroentérologiques basé sur une nouvelle ontologie des polypes qui peut être utilisée pour aider les médecins à décider comment traiter un polype. La solution proposée utilise une ontologie de polype et se base sur une adaptation des raisonnements standard des logiques de description pour permettre une construction semi-automatique de requêtes et d’annotation d’images. Une deuxième contribution de ce travail consiste dans la proposition d’une nouvelle approche pour le calcul de réponses relaxées des requêtes ontologiques basée sur une notion de distance entre un individu donné et une requête donnée. Cette distance est calculée en comptant le nombre d’opérations élémentaires à appliquer à une ABox afin de rendre un individu donné x, une réponse correcte à une requête. Ces opérations élémentaires sont l’ajout à ou la suppression d’une ABox, d’assertions sur des concepts atomiques (ou leur négation) et/ou des rôles atomiques. La thèse propose plusieurs sémantiques formelles pour la relaxation de requêtes et étudie les problèmes de décision et d’optimisation sous-jacents. / Querying efficiently images using an image retrieval system is a long standing and challenging research problem.In the medical domain, images are increasingly produced in large quantities due their increasing interests for many medical practices such as diagnosis, report writing and teaching. This thesis proposes a semantic-based gastroenterological images annotation and retrieval system based on a new polyp ontology that can be used to support physicians to decide how to deal with a polyp. The proposed solution uses a polyp ontology and rests on an adaptation of standard reasonings in description logic to enable semi automatic construction of queries and image annotation.A second contribution of this work lies in the proposition of a new approach for computing relaxed answers of ontological queries based on a notion of an edit distance of a given individual w.r.t. a given query. Such a distance is computed by counting the number of elementary operations needed to be applied to an ABox in order to make a given individual a correct answer to a given query. The considered elementary operations are adding to or removing from an ABox, assertions on atomic concept, a negation of an atomic concept or an atomic role. The thesis proposes several formal semantics for such query approximation and investigates the underlying decision and optimisation problems.

Cette thèse se fixe comme tâche d’examiner la manière originale et inédite par laquelle Maurice Blondel revisite les preuves classiques de l’existence de Dieu, principalement, l’argument ontologique. Cet argument occupe, chez notre auteur, une place prépondérante, et constitue un moment essentiel dans le développement de sa doctrine. C’est une approche qui se comprend comme un retour à une doctrine ancienne (Cf. l’argument d’Anselme), mais en même temps comme une élaboration originale. De ce point de vue, la lecture suivie de L’Action laisse entrevoir trois axes d’interprétations de l’argument ontologique que notre thèse entend mettre en lumière.D’abord, Blondel relit les preuves de l’existence de Dieu dans la perspective de la dialectique de la volonté dont elles amorcent le « troisième moment » conflictuel, avant que le conflit ne se résolve en alternative ou en option. Car, il y a toujours une inadéquation entre ce qui est voulu et le dynamisme qui, en nous, est le principe du vouloir c’est-à-dire entre ce qu’il appelle la volonté voulue et la volonté voulante. En conséquence, c’est en vue de l’Unique nécessaire que Blondel ébauche une synergie des preuves et renouvelle, en quelque sorte, l’argument ontologique pour montrer que chaque homme y est inévitablement embarqué.Ensuite le recours « à un inconnu inaccessible, dont la présence est pourtant pressentie sans être encore reconnue » ou la référence explicite à des expressions apophatiques pour parler de l’Être ou de l’Absolu manifeste clairement un recours symptomatique à la théologie négative comme il le reconnaît, à la suite du Pseudo-Denys que « l’affirmation est moins juste, et la négation plus vraie », et d’autant plus qu’il ajoute : « c’est le néant qui le confesse ». Or, cette donnée n’affaiblit en rien la pertinence de la preuve, car Blondel en fait une véritable expérience spirituelle.Enfin la conséquence qu’il tire de cette relecture, en insistant sur la portée philosophique de l’option, constitue le lieu privilégié qui confirme bien que cette approche n’a pas pour visée la pleine possession de l’Être, mais une ouverture, une préparation nécessaire de notre indigence à admettre et à affirmer cette existence de Dieu. Car, pour chaque existence, « cette preuve est, moins une vue qu’une vie » et que suivant une influence de la preuve cartésienne « celle-ci n’est absolue que là où il y a idée parfaite de la perfection même, là où l’essence est réelle et l’existence idéale. Dans ces conditions, l’idée de Dieu, de l’Être est comme réfractée, conditionnée, obscurcie par notre imperfection. Cependant, elle nous contraint à affirmer, du lieu où somme toute elle n’est pas, sa réalité, sa perfection.À partir d’une reconsidération des articulations de la preuve dans L’Action, notre thèse aura eu comme tâche d’élucider la portée et la pertinence de ces trois axes qui constituent l’originalité de la lecture blondélienne de l’argument ontologique. / This thesis has set itself the task of reviewing the new and original way in which Maurice Blondel revisits the classic proofs of God’s existence, mainly, the ontological argument. This argument holds, in our author, a prominent place, and is a key moment in the development of his doctrine. It is an approach that makes sense as a return to an old doctrine (See the Anselm’s argument ), but at the same time as an original development. From this point of view, reading followed by L’Action suggests three lines of interpretations of the ontological argument that our thesis intends to highlight.Firstly, Blondel reread the proofs of God’s existence from the perspective of the dialectic of the will they begin the third time conflict before the conflict will be resolved in alternative or optional. Because, there is always a mismatch between what is wanted and dynamism which, in us, is the principle of the will that is to say between what he calls the necessary will and determination voulante. Consequently, it is for the One need Blondel draft synergy evidence and renewed, in a way, the ontological argument to show that every man is inevitably embedded.Then use an inaccessible stranger, whose presence is sensed without being yet still recognized or the explicit reference to apophatiques expressions to speak of Being or the Absolute manifests clearly symptomatic use of negative theology as acknowledges, following the Pseudo-Dionysius that “the statement is less just, and truest denial”, and especially as he adds, “ it is the nothingness that confess.” However , this data does not weaken in any way the relevance of the evidence , because Blondel makes a truly spiritual experience.Finally he draws the consequence of this replay, emphasizing the philosophical significance of the option, which is the central authority confirms that this approach has not referred to the full possession of Being, but an opening, a necessary preparation to admit our poverty and affirm the existence of God. For each existence, " the evidence is less a view that a life " and following the influence of the Cartesian evidence " it is absolute that where there is perfect idea of perfection , there where gasoline is real and the ideal existence . In these circumstances, the idea of God, of Being is refracted as conditioned , darkened by our imperfection . However, it forces us to state , after all, the place where it is not , its reality, its perfection.From a reconsideration of the joints of proof in L'Action, our thesis has had the task of clarifying the scope and relevance of these three areas which constitute the originality of the Blondel reading the ontological argument.

My dissertation focuses on an analysis of postmodern narrative strategies in Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (ULB) and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting ( BLF) . By analysing the postmodern ab/use of narrative strategies, I argue that postmodern fiction marks a decided shift from both classical realism and modernism. My dissertation has predominantly been motivated through my contention that postmodern fiction is not elitist as it has been perceived to be. Rather, I suggest that postmodern fiction ab/uses narrative strategies to deconstruct the ontological boundaries between the political and private and fiction and 'fact'. Consequently, postmodern fiction interrogates the contrived intelligibility of History. A further argument that I raise is that postmodern fiction through its (re) appropriation, subversion and use of parodic structures creates.narrative space for the Other. In order not to canonize Kundera's texts, I situate both ULB and BLF as 'nodes' within a diffuse network of intertextual discourse. My analyses of the postmodern narrative strategies in ULB and BLF, attempt to interrogate the diffuse 'nature' of postmodern fiction which resists both authorative analysis and closure. In exploring the relationship between recuperation and postmodern narrative strategies in ULB and BLF and other works and/or texts of fiction, I argue that postmodern fiction does not revel in its narrativity, it constitutes, instead, a political strategy / Afrikaans and Theory of Literature / M.A. (Theory of Literature)

La recherche du Dasein féminin est une enquête sur la relation symbiotique entre la femme et son environnement comme il se déroule durant une certaine période de l'histoire. En postulant l'existence d'une temporalité féminine particulière et d'une manière féminine d'être-au-monde, ce projet conteste la vision de Martin Heidegger selon laquelle le Dasein, dans sa neutralité, n'est d'aucun sexe. En commençant par souligner que la lacune de sa philosophie repose dans son incapacité à aborder le problème de la sexualité comme différence ontologique, ce projet fait appel à différents philosophes, notablement de la tradition féministe anglo-saxonne, afin de caractériser l'unique façon d'être de la femme. Dans la mesure où notre contact avec l'environnement est de plus en plus mêlé aux questions de la technique, je questionne la relation particulière de la femme à celle-ci, et spécialement à la technique reproductive qui marque de façon prégnante l'association historique des femmes à la « nature ». En m'appuyant sur la philosophie de L'Etre, de l’art, et de la technique de Heidegger, ainsi que sur différents penseurs de disciplines variées, j'esquisse une existence qui est singulier au féminin. / The search for female Dasein is an inquiry into the symbiotic relationship between woman and her environment as it unfolds during a certain historical time. In postulating the existence of a particular female temporality and a feminine way of being-in-the-world, this project contests Martin Heidegger’s view that Dasein in its neutrality is neither of the two sexes. Beginning with the insight that the gap in his philosophy lies in his failure to address the issue of sexuality as an ontological difference, this project draws from diverse philosophers, particularly from the feminist Anglo-Saxon tradition to characterize woman’s unique way of being. Insofar as our engagement with the environment is increasingly entangled with questions of the technological, I ask whether woman has a particular relationship with technology, specifically reproductive technology where her historical association with « nature » becomes especially salient. Reading Heidegger’s philosophy of Being, art, and technology in conjunction with different thinkers across various disciplines, I sketch out an existence that is particularly feminine.

Since its invention nearly 150 years ago, margarine has proven itself adaptable to multiple ingredients and techniques whilst continuing to mimic the fatty tastes familiar to eaters in Northern Europe. In this thesis I argue that it this malleability that makes margarine a useful subject with which to explore constructions of eating-well. This thesis examines the ways in which margarine is done, why it is done in the ways that it is, and explores how such doings frame possibilities for eating-together-well. Eating-well has become something of a social obsession in the UK in recent years. Individual eating practices have become framed as a responsibility of care for personal and societal health, for agricultural workers, animal welfare and for the future of the planet. Nonetheless, it is commonly believed that although deeply personal, food habits are culturally and socially engrained, and as such are hard to change. This empirically led thesis, examines the knowledges and practices of producers and consumers, and establishes habit formation as a typical response by both producers and consumers to becoming overwhelmed with incompatible knowledges and information, compelling them to choose, prioritise and juggle ‘moral’ values. Yet, I demonstrate that such habits only remain stable until disrupted by an event which overflows and troubles this settlement. Building on this, this thesis then examines the possibilities offered by the creation of micro-events for encountering, knowing, and relating with, margarine matters anew. In this way, this thesis investigates the values, norms and power relations entangled with the presentation and enactment of margarine and its constituent parts as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ foods, examining both what these framings do, and how they are maintained. In approaching margarine matters in this way, this thesis offers three key contributions to the area of food geographies. Firstly, I demonstrate how commodity frameworks shift political problems in to a technical and administrative realm and close down spaces of critical thought and political intervention. Secondly, I establish that ‘strange encounters’ are events which can add to understandings of the more-than human world-making of food knowledges, practices, and habits. Thirdly, I determine that the novel methodological approach of ‘playing with our food’ is a productive technique with which to prefigure and rehearse more nuanced ethical understandings of eating-well as a relational doing that is excessive to consuming-well.

Ontological database management systems are a powerful tool that combine traditional database techniques with ontological reasoning methods. In this setting, a classical extensional database is enriched with an ontology, or a set of logical assertions, that describe how new, intensional knowledge can be derived from the extensional data. Conjunctive queries are therefore answered against this combined knowledge base of extensional and intensional data. Many languages that represent ontologies have been introduced in the literature. In this thesis we will focus on existential rules (also called tuple-generating dependencies or Datalog^± rules), and three established languages in this area, namely guarded-based rules, sticky rules and weakly-acyclic rules. The main goal of the thesis is to enrich these languages with non-deterministic constructs (i.e. disjunctions) and investigate the complexity of the answering conjunctive queries under these extended languages. As is common in the literature, we will distinguish between combined complexity, where the database, the ontology and the query are considered as input, and data complexity, where only the database is considered as input. The latter case is relevant in practice, as usually the ontology and the query can be considered as fixed, and are usually much smaller than the database itself. After giving appropriate definitions to extend the considered languages to disjunctive existential rules, we establish a series of complexity results, completing the complexity picture for each of the above languages, and four different query languages: arbitrary conjunctive queries, bounded (hyper-)treewidth queries, acyclic queries and atomic queries. For the guarded-based languages, we show a strong 2EXPTIME lower bound for general queries that holds even for fixed ontologies, and establishes 2EXPTIME-completeness of the query answering problem in this case. For acyclic queries, the complexity can be reduced to EXPTIME, if the predicate arity is bounded, and the problem even becomes tractable for certain restricted languages, if only atomic queries are used. For ontologies represented by sticky disjunctive rules, we show that the problem becomes undecidable, even in the case of data complexity and atomic queries. Finally, for weakly-acyclic rules, we show that the complexity increases from 2EXPTIME to coN2EXPTIME in general, and from tractable to coNP in case of the data complexity, independent of which query language is used. After answering the open complexity questions, we investigate applications and relevant consequences of our results for description logics and give two generic complexity statements, respectively, for acyclic and general conjunctive query answering over description logic knowledge bases. These generic results allow for an easy determination of the complexity of this reasoning task, based on the expressivity of the considered description logic.