capturing knowledge about philosophy
In this paper, we present an ontology developed to support annotating and reasoning about philosophical knowledge. By this term, we refer to both the factual domain of philosophers, concerning their lives and publications, and the theoretical domain, concerning the ideas they have produced and their relationships. The ontology provides a novel model, which brings together a number of existing formalizations and a series of new ones. In this paper we describe the design of the ontology, in particular focusing on the solutions we have devised to address the modelling problems and natural language ambiguities, which occur when capturing knowledge in a domain as complex as that of philosophy. This work is being carried out in the context of developing a tool, PhiloSURFical, which aims to support ontology-driven exploration of philosophical resources. Specifically, the ontology makes it possible to navigate the philosophical domain, according to a number of narratives, which include theoretical, historical, argumentational, geographic, and others.
philosophy navigation ontology of ideas