Volume 182, Number 2, 205-233, DOI: 10.1007/s11229-009-9659-9

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

Cameron Buckner, Mathias Niepert and Colin Allen

From the issue entitled "REPRESENTING PHILOSOPHY"

View Related Documents

Abstract

The application of digital humanities techniques to philosophy is changing the way scholars approach the discipline. This paper seeks to open a discussion about the difficulties, methods, opportunities, and dangers of creating and utilizing a formal representation of the discipline of philosophy. We review our current project, the Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project, which uses a combination of automated methods and expert feedback to create a dynamic computational ontology for the discipline of philosophy. We argue that our distributed, expert-based approach to modeling the discipline carries substantial practical and philosophical benefits over alternatives. We also discuss challenges facing our project (and any other similar project) as well as the future directions for digital philosophy afforded by formal modeling.

Keywords  Ontology – Taxonomy – Encyclopedias – Metaphilosophy – Digital philosophy – Semantic web

Fulltext Preview

Image of the first page of the fulltext document