A Foundry of Human Activities and Infrastructures

Abstract

Direct representation knowledgebases can enhance and even provide an alternative to document-centered digital libraries. Here we consider realist semantic modeling of everyday activities and infrastructures in such knowledgebases. Because we want to integrate a wide variety of topics, a collection of ontologies (a foundry) and a range of other knowledge resources are needed. We first consider modeling the routine procedures that support human activities and technologies. Next, we examine the interactions of technologies with aspects of social organization. Then, we consider approaches and issues for developing and validating explanations of the relationships among various entities.In [1] and related studies we explored indexing digitized historical newspapers. It was difficult to index the articles for retrieval or, even, to unambiguously identify what text should be treated as an article. Thus, we proposed the development of knowledge-rich "community models" to improve retrieval. Many aspects of infrastructure associated with everyday activities and infrastructure generally can be described with such community models. Such models would cover both tangible and intangible cultural heritage such as pottery, clothing, dance, and religious traditions.This work is parallel to a proposal we have made for direct representation of scientific research results [4]. However, there are additional challenges for descriptions of culture and history because of the lack of consensus about the definitions for social entities and because there are disagreements about the details of cultures and histories. Nonetheless, as information scientists, we believe that it is useful to develop frameworks for articulating and exploring the possibilities. Ultimately such frameworks should support tools both for the public and for scholars.

Semantic Modeling With Foundries

“…This is remarkably similar to the pairing of objects with methods, which is the goal of encapsulation in object-oriented approaches. Thus, we explore how BFO version 2.0 (BFO2) may be interpreted and extended to make it compatible with object-oriented analysis, design, and programming, especially in the context of specifying the HAIF [6]. Cumulatively, these methods form an extension of BFO2 that we have described as a Model Layer.…”

“…A rigorous application of Realizables should make those associations explicit. We implement Transitions as atomic operations 6 that create and/or delete Relationships of Objects to other Entities (cf., [2,4,6,9]). .…”

“…Everyday human activates and infrastructures interactions are complex and we need multiple perspectives for describing them. [6] proposed three levels for describing social or cultural objects. 12 The first level is purely physical.…”

“…The Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry [20] is well established, and there is an emerging Industry Ontologies Foundry (IOF). 1 In [6], we proposed the Human Activities and Infrastructures Foundry (HAIF). Here, we consider in detail some of the issues for the implementation of that Foundry.…”

“…A distinction might be made that impact strength would normally be measured by some action on the Object (an impact). Moreover, it might be possible to calculate impact strength directly from physical properties 6. These are similar to productions for OPS5 and contracts in Eiffel in programming languages 7.…”