Michele Pasin’s PhD work on the representation and navigation of philosopical resources (PhiloSURphical) has attracted the attention of the people working on the Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project, which aims to enlarge the usage of digital technologies by scholars in the humanities. As the authors note, the ³task seems particularly daunting because issues in the humanities are presented in abstract language demanding the kind of subtle interpretation often thought to be beyond the scope of artificial intelligence, and humanities scholars themselves often disagree about the structure of their disciplines. The future of humanities computing depends on having tools for automatically discovering complex semantic relationships among different parts of a corpus².

As part of this effort, the InPhO project is implementing a knowledge management system, which relies on an ontology which is dynamically updated on the basis of a statistical analysis of the corpus provided by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) and the editors’ annotations. The team of the InPhO project, headed by Colin Allen, have reviewed Michele Pasin’s ontology for the philosophical domain, and decided to include it in future versions of their model for extending the representation and navigation functionalities of the SEP.

Related Links:

• PhiloSURFical website
  
• Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project
  
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  
• Paper on the PhiloSURFical ontology @ SWEL-07