A dynamic ontology for a dynamic reference work

Abstract

The successful deployment of digital technologies by humanities scholars presents computer scientists with a number of unique scientific and technological challenges. The task seems particularly daunting because issues in the humanities are presented in abstract language demanding the kind of subtle interpretation often thought to be beyond the scope of artificial intelligence, and humanities scholars themselves often disagree about the structure of their disciplines. The future of humanities computing depends on having tools for automatically discovering complex semantic relationships among different parts of a corpus. Digital library tools for the humanities will need to be capable of dynamically tracking the introduction of new ideas and interpretations and applying them to older texts in ways that support the needs of scholars and students.This paper describes the design of new algorithms and the adjustment of existing algorithms to support the automated and semiautomated management of domain-rich metadata for an established digital humanities project, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Our approach starts with a "hand-built" formal ontology that is modified and extended by a combination of automated and semiautomated methods, thus becoming a "dynamic ontology". We assess the suitability of current information retrieval and information extraction methods for the task of automatically maintaining the ontology. We describe a novel measure of term-relatedness that appears to be particularly helpful for predicting hierarchical relationships in the ontology. We believe that our project makes a further contribution to information science by being the first to harness the collaboration inherent in a expert-maintained dynamic reference work to the task of maintaining and extending a formal ontology. We place special emphasis on the task of bringing domain expertise to bear on all phases of the development and deployment of the system, from the initial design of the software and ontology to its dynamic use in a fully operational digital reference work.

From encyclopedia to ontology: toward dynamic representation of the discipline of philosophy

“…We intend to explore this extension, but we do not expect its results to be as reliable as the more modest method already implemented. 23 Finally, experts are shown a third feedback page where they are asked to evaluate the non-taxonomic relations inferred by our automated methods (see Niepert et al 2007). We currently import non-taxonomic relations from unvalidated sources like Wikipedia, and statistical methods such as hidden Markov models and conditional random fields are being developed to infer relationships obtaining between terms occurring in the document.…”

Ontological requirements for annotation and navigation of philosophical resources

“…As claimed by the authors of a recent project for the indexing of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Niepert et al 2007):…”

“…The most relevant (and to our knowledge unique) attempt to systematically formalize the philosophical domain is the one carried out in Niepert et al (2007), as part of a larger project aimed at building a dynamic ontological-backbone for the online version of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). Compared to our approach, this work is less focused on knowledge modeling and more targeted at finding useful information extraction techniques, which could benefit from the vast expert-reviewed SEP. For example, in their case the idea sub-branch of the ontology is populated according to "semantic relevance" of ideas (based on words co-occurrence), instead of trying to model a hierarchy of types.…”

Noesis and the encyclopedic internet vision

“…InPhO is an organic and emergent taxonomy of the discipline of philosophy that uses artificial intelligence algorithms to "read" the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) in collaboration with feedback from human users (Niepert et al 2007). It is designed to identify philosophically rich vocabulary insofar as it is distributed in the SEP, isolate patterns of generality and specificity, and present this to the user in the form of a topic tree.…”