Ontological Requirements for Annotation and ... - The CIDOC CRM

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This kind of modeling, in the context of the PhiloSurfical tool (cf. section 4), is extremelyuseful because of the multiple navigational pathways it can support (e.g. imagine a ʻlateralʼstep taking us to another event having the same topic, or to another topic treated duringthe same event, etc.). Please note that in the figure some relations (e.g. has-worked-for) aregraphical shortcuts for the actual and lengthier formalization of the relevant event (e.g. anevent instance stating that an actor worked for an institution at some point in time, etc.).As already pointed out in previous publications (Pasin and Motta, 2007, Pasin et al., 2007)we decided to integrate the event-based CIDOC reference model with formalizations fromother ontologies, because they provide facilities that are relevant to the points C, D and Ewe have highlighted earlier during the domain analysis. For example, we included a timereasoninglibrary implementing the well-known Allen specifications (Allen, 1984); weincluded knowledge about the domain of publications from the AKT reference ontology(AKT, 2002) and knowledge about information objects from the related module of theDolce foundational ontology (Gangemi et al., 2002).Figure 2. The intellectual activities branchFinally, a large portion of the ontology consists of new concepts and relations, mostlyaimed at the description of philosophical events and ideas. The events having morerelevance with respect to the philosophical domain are the following:1) the temporal entities regarding events related to the academic life and to the life ofphilosophers. Among this group of events we have births and deaths of philosophers(e.g. the death of Socrates), production of physical objects (e.g. Pascal's constructionof the arithmetic machine), journeys performed during their lives (e.g. Wittgenstein's tripto Norway), production of publications (e.g. the publication of the first English version ofKantʼs “Critique of practical reason” in 1836), social-gatherings, conferences, joiningof groups (e.g. when Aristotle joined the Academy of Plato, or when Heidegger joinedthe Nazi party).
2) The temporal entities related to the production and modification of philosophical ideas.These types of events are gathered under the class intellectual-activity (see fig. 2).Among them, we can find conceptual-creation (event modeling the creation ofconceptual entities such as ideas and information objects); idea-modification (eventsreflecting the changing of one or more ideas within the context of a view, e.g. theevolution of the meaning of “libido” in the work of Sigmund Freud); theorytransposition(class modeling the special case when a theory is taken out of a contextand reused within another one, e.g. “Spencerʼs evolutionism”, which extends “Darwinʼsevolutionism” from biology to metaphysics), etc.3) The temporal entities representing philosophical historical periods, i.e., macro-events(in CIDOC, such entities are subsumed by a class named period) characterized by anintrinsic reference to a specific group of people or a school of thought. The importantclasses here are intellectual movement (e.g. the “enlightenment”) and philosophicalmovement (e.g. “logical positivism”, interpreted as an event). The formal framework usedfor representing the characteristics of these entities has been previously discussed(Pasin and Motta, 2007) under the title ʻpattern #1: is rationalism a school of thought oran event?ʼThe other major section which we extended CIDOC with is the one departing from thephilosophical-idea class, which is located in the conceptual-object branch of theontology (according to CIDOC, this is where all abstract entities are). In relation to theinitial domain analysis, these formalizations satisfy the requirements described in points Fand G. In section 3 we concentrate the discussion on this branch of the ontology.2.3 Support for alternative interpretationsIt is important to remember that only classes and relations are what remains unchangeablein our system, i.e., that is where lies the ontological commitment 4 we demand fromanybody using the ontology. On the contrary, the instantiation of our classes with elementsspecific to a single philosophy is a process which relies entirely on a userʼs privateunderstanding of that philosophy.As already discussed in section 1, this feature allows annotators to use our meta-languagewith a great degree of freedom. As a result, the interpretations of philosophical subjectsthey create can be very different from each other. The only downside, in such cases, isthat the results of incompatible instantiations are not handled easily by computers, thusrequesting a manual integration.In order to provide a solution to this problem, the ontology features a mechanism by whichwe can construct alternative and possibly competing interpretations of the same entity, in such a way that the computer ʻknowsʼhow to handle each interpretation as an alternative view on a common topic. Thismechanism becomes useful, for example, when we want to have multiple annotatorsworking simultaneously within a single ontology-based environment (i.e., because we areinterested in highlighting with precision how the various peopleʼs interpretations differ).
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