Title:

Annotation and Ontology in most Humanities research: accommodating a more informal interpretation context

Year:

2012

Abstract:

The emergence of formal ontologies into the World Wide Web has had a profound effect on research in certain fields. In the Life Sciences, for example, key research information has been captured in formal domain ontologies, like those mentioned in the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies website (OBOFoundary 2012). In parallel with this has been the development of the AO annotation ontology framework (AO 2012) which formalises annotation to connect ontologies such as those in the OBOFoundary to references to them in the scientific literature: an act sometimes referred to as "semantic annotation", and tools such as the SWAN annotation system (SWAN 2008) have emerged to support this. We will call the activity of linking references in a domain literature directly to entities in one or more domain ontologies "direct semantic annotation". We show it in schematic form in figure I. The annotations – shown as heavier lines connecting spots in the literature to the ontologies would be in the AO annotation ontology, or something similar to it.
Can direct semantic annotation be applied to research in the Humanities? For it to work as it does in the Life Sciences, formal models of humanities materials, such as CIDOC-­‐CRM, need to exist and be already used to model material of interest to the humanities. Not much of this has happened at present, although perhaps Linked Data initiatives (Heath 2011) show some promise in that general direction.

Full reference:

John Bradley, Michele Pasin. Annotation and Ontology in most Humanities research: accommodating a more informal interpretation context - NeDiMaH workshop on ontology based annotation, held in conjunction with Digital Humanities 2012 Hamburg, Germany July 2012 . PDF



See also:

2017


paper  Fitting Personal Interpretation with the Semantic Web: lessons learned from Pliny

Digital Humanities Quarterly, Jan 2017. Volume 11 Number 1


2013


paper  Moving EMLoT towards the web of data: an approach to the representation of humanities citations based on role theory and formal ontology

New Technologies in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, (forthcoming). (part of the 'Envisioning REED in the Digital Age' collection)



paper  Citations and Annotations in Classics: Old Problems and New Perspectives

Collaborative Annotation in Shared Environments: Metadata, vocabularies and techniques in the Digital Humanities (workshop co-located with ACM DocEng 2013 Conference), Florence, Sep 2013.



paper  Fitting Personal Interpretations with the Semantic Web

Digital Humanities 2013, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Jul 2013.


2010


paper  Review of Interontology conference 2010

Humana Mente, Journal of Philosophical Studies, 13, May 2010. Issue 13


2009


paper  Laying the Conceptual Foundations for Data Integration in the Humanities

Proc. of the Digital Humanities Conference (DH09), Maryland, USA, Jun 2009. pp. 211-215




2008


paper  Approach and ontology in PhiloSURFical

COST EU Workshop, Ancona University, May 2008.




2006


paper  An ontology for the description and navigation through philosophical resources

European Conference on Philosophy and Computing (ECAP-06), Trondheim, Norway, Jun 2006.



paper  Paving the way towards the e-humanities: a Semantic Web approach to support the learning of philosophy

Poster paper presented at the 3rd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC-06), Budva, Montenegro, Jun 2006.


2005


paper  AquaLog A Ontology-portable Question Answering interface for the Semantic Web

2nd European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC05), Heraklion, Crete, Greece, May 2005. pp. 546-562