Title:
Year:
Abstract:
This thesis describes a novel method for formalizing philosophical knowledge and shows how, by using it, it is possible to produce intelligent navigation mechanisms for supporting learning about philosophy. The approach taken relies on the usage of Semantic Web technologies for the
codification of the meaning of data and the retrieval of relevant resources. As such, it represents a groundbreaking attempt to adopt these disciplines in a less traditional domain; a domain that, because of its inherent abstractness, poses peculiar problems both at the epistemological and the knowledge representation levels.
What are the major types of entities playing a role in philosophical discourse, and how shall we proceed in order to have a computer manipulate efficiently a set of representations about them? These are the kind of questions lying at the heart of our research. Moreover, we attempt to test this formal framework by putting it into practice with a real-world application, PhiloSurfical.
PhiloSurfical is a prototype tool created with the purpose of helping students learn about a classic in twentieth century philosophy, Wittgensteinʼs ʻTractatus Logico-Philosophicusʼ, by means of dynamic and contextual navigation mechanisms. In particular, the dissertation discusses how such mechanisms could be developed so to mimic some of the classic ways the philosophical discipline employs to narrate itself. For this reason, we generally refer to them
as narrative pathways (e.g., historical narrative, theoretical narrative, etc.).
Evaluation of both the ontology and the prototype tool have shown positive results. Also, it has revealed interesting and complementary research direction which we present in the final sections of this work.
Full reference:
2012
Digital Humanities 2012, Hamburg, Germany, Jul 2012.
2011
paper Ontological Requirements for Annotation and Navigation of Philosophical Resources
Synthese, Volume 182, Number 2, Springer, Jan 2011.
2010
LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing, Aug 2010.
2009
paper PhiloSURFical: An Ontological Approach To Support Philosophy Learning
Semantic Web Technologies for e-Learning, Oct 2009. D. Dicheva, R. Mizoguchi, J. Greer (Eds.), vol. 4 The Future of Learning, IOS Press
paper Ontological Requirement for Supporting Smart Navigation of Philosophical Resources
PhD Thesis, Milton Keynes, UK, The Open University, Jul 2009.
2008
paper Formalizing ʻphilosophicalʼ narratives: the tension between form and content
European Computing and Philosophy Conference (ECAP08), Montpellier, France, Jun 2008.
2007
paper Supporting Philosophers’ Work through the Semantic Web: Ontological Issues
Fifth International Workshop on Ontologies and Semantic Web for E-Learning (SWEL-07), held in conjunction with AIED-07, Marina Del Rey, California, USA, Jul 2007.
2006
paper An ontology for the description and navigation through philosophical resources
European Conference on Philosophy and Computing (ECAP-06), Trondheim, Norway, Jun 2006.