Ontological requirements for annotation and navigation of philosophical resources

Abstract

In this article, we describe an ontology aimed at the representation of the relevant entities and relations in the philosophical world. We will guide the reader through our modeling choices, so to highlight the ontology's practical purpose: to enable an annotation of philosophical resources which is capable of supporting pedagogical navigation mechanisms. The ontology covers all the aspects of philosophy, thus including characterizations of entities such as people, events, documents, and ideas. In particular, here we will present a detailed exposition of the entities belonging to the idea branch of the ontology, for they have a crucial role in the world of philosophy. Moreover, as an example of the type of applications made possible by the ontology we will introduce PhiloSurfical, a prototype tool we created to navigate contextually a classic work in twentieth century philosophy, Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. We discuss the potential usage of such navigation mechanisms in educational and scholarly contexts, which aim to enhance the learning process through the serendipitous discovery of relevant resources.

A dynamic ontology for a dynamic reference work

“…Additionally, our techniques for working with the particular formal ontology we have built should generalize to alternative ontologies. Our goals are pragmatic and we adopt a pluralistic stance on classifying the subject matter of philosophy, envisaging a future extension of our approach to alternative categorization schemes (e.g., the pedagogical approach to ontology construction taken by Pasin [24]). …”

“…While numerous ontologies already exist in the public domain for many physical and abstract neighborhoods of the world, little progress has been made towards creating ontologies of ideas (and virtually nothing for philosophical ideas, although see [10,24]). A standard way to design an ontology for ideas would be to organize ideas according to distinctions in their social or structural roles, irrespective of the ideas' particular semantic content.…”