Forgetting Jerusalem from the Bible to Faulkner Essay

Forgetting Jerusalem from the Bible to Faulkner - Essay Example He then imprecates God to remember what the Babylonians did to Jerusalem. How they tore down the city to its foundations, and treated it as something worthless. Having his beloved nation torn down as something worthless, the Psalmist curses the daughters of Babylon. He desires revenge, seeking that what they had done to the children of Zion, too, will be done unto them - having their infants snatched and dashed against the rocks! Psalm 137 is basically a song of anger, as well as of a desire for revenge for all the wrongdoing that has been implicated to him and his people. He is singing to God, reminding Him of his faithfulness, and seeking justice for him and his nation. The harsh, cursing prayer song of the Psalmist to God against the Babylonians in Psalm 137 shows that in these kinds of prayers, cursing the enemy or offender, is due to the believers feeling of distress. In 1 Samuel 24-26, it is shown how David, a model of patience, who on more than one occasion refused to avenge himself on his persecutor Saul. David spares Saul. As any other man, David had weaknesses, and one of these was being too lenient. He was compassionate with such offenders as Shimei, who cursed him (in 2 Samuel 16), and his son Absalom, who rebelled against him (2 Samuel 18-19). David didn't seek out personal vengeance upon his enemies and offenders, but in his prayers, he could hardly pray for compassion upon them. In his prayers, he could not bring himself to sincerely pray to God that Saul should win or that God's promise to him which included the promise of the Savior should be overthrown by Saul or Absalom. He very much opposed their schemes with prayer. Psalm 137 is a very reflective work by the original writer with overtones that reach into the lives of all of us today. Until such time as the knowledge of Yahweh fills the earth as it was written by Jeremiah, we are waiting by the "river of Babylon" with our captors, struggling to make sense of the things that are before us in our daily lives. Just as it is stated in Jeremiah 31:33-34, "But this is the covenant that I will make the house of Israel after those days, says Yahweh, I will put My law in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people; and they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying: 'Know Yahweh; 'for they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, says Yahweh; for I will

Lightweight Community-Driven Approach to Support Ontology Evolution Essay

Lightweight Community-Driven Approach to Support Ontology Evolution - Essay Example The chapter goes on to identify the advantage of ontology evolution, the lack of systematic approach for ontology evolution and explains the motivation for this study. The chapter ends with the objectives of the study and thesis structure. 1.2 Ontology Definitions The term â€Å"Ontology† is derived from its usage in philosophy where it means the study of being or existence as well as the basic categories (Witmer 2004). Therefore, it is now used to refer to what exists in a system model. Definition 1: According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2011), â€Å"It is a particular nature of being or the kinds of things that have existence. Definition 2: Gruber (1993), on the other hand, provides a more concrete definition of Ontology. He defines it as a study which explicitly explains concepts and relationships (Gruber 1993). The set of concepts (e.g. classes, relations, functions) are used to represent and describe domain knowledge. For example, in oil and gas industry there is an established ontology for Statoil in Norway (Association 2008) a standard library related to an oil and gas domain. 1.3 Ontology Editor Ontology Editor is an application which is developed to view and edit ontology. In the past few years many applications have been developed such as OilEd (Bechhofer, Horrocks et al. 2001), OntoEdit (Sure, Erdmann et al. 2002), Protege (Gennari, Musen et al. 2003) and Web-Protege (Tudorache, Vendetti et al. 2008). Further details are explained below about each ontology editor: - OilEd: OilEd was developed in Manchester University. It is a simple ontology editor that provides further guidance in the development of Ontology Interchange Language (OIL)-based ontologies (Bechhofer, Horrocks et al. 2001), which is basically a web-based representation of ontologies organized to make it accessible and usable (Cover, 2000). It is the one which pioneers ontology editing (Bechhofer, Horrocks et al. 2001). - OntoEdit: OntoEdit was developed by the Knowledge Ma nagement Group at University of Karsnuhe Institute AFIB. It provides an ontology development that allows collaboration and inferencing. The method involves three main steps which start with requirements specification, refinement and evaluation. The first step is where the ontology engineers and domain experts meet and work towards identifying the goal of the ontology, description of the domain, and the availability of references. Design guidelines are also established in this step. Then, the team then makes the ontology in the refinement phase. Finally, the ontology requires evaluation according to its requirements specification by identifying possible errors in the ontology and efficiency for enabling collaborative work (Sure, Erdmann et al. 2002). - Protege: Protege was developed by Mark Musen at Stanford University. It is an ontology editor which has come a long way. Protege started in 1987 as a small application, which was aimed at building knowledge acquisition tools. Protege h as then been developed further, providing many new features for each version that has been released. Currently, there are hundreds of individuals and research groups are using Protege (Gennari, Musen et al. 2003). - Web-Protege: Web-Protege is a web version of Protege, also developed in Stanford University. This allows the users who have access to view and edit the ontology from the internet (Tudorache, Vende