Ontologies

From digitalHPS

Why do we need ontologies for HPS digital research?

1. Structuring knowledge within the HPS community

2. Allows interchange and interoperability of information between History, Philosophy, and Sociology

• efficiency
• more network nodes = better and more precise search results
• enables work across traditional disciplinary boundaries

3. Allows comparative work to be done within History, Philosophy, and Sociology

4. Allows us to ask and answer new kinds of questions beyond basic keyword searches

Challenges:

1. There is no single good ontology.

2. Disciplines (and individuals) don't like to be told what to study!

3. High barrier to entry.

4. Not clear where to begin.

Strategies for ontology building in digital HPS:

1. Utilize existing metadata standards like Dublin Core for ontology fields like People

2. Develop tool(s) to build simple ontology - some structure is better than none at all - and provide recipes for creating new ontologies or building upon existing ontologies

3. Offer repository of extendable "standard" ontologies like OBO foundry for biomedical ontologies

4. Build upon existing ontologies utilizing versioning systems like github

5. Find 3 good use cases or test cases to show why an ontology might be useful in HPS research.

• InPho, which contains existing ontologies and practices
• Some kind of non-document-based ontology
• Test case that is able take advantage of semantic structure within a set of documents; leverages natural language processing tools with ontologies.