Towards an ontology for information objects

Abstract

1st workshop on semantic web technologies for human and social sciences, SWTHS, Catania, ItalieOntologies for knowledge representation and data management often need to model what are commonly called information objects across the literature. Consider, e.g., the distinction between the physical copy of Dante's Divine Comedy on my shelf, and the Comedy on itself. The former is a physical object located in space and time; the latter is an information object that is carried by the physical book. In the digital humanities information objects are fundamental to represent the content of documents and paintings, among others (see, e.g., CIDOC-CRM). From an ontological perspective, the nature of information objects is challenging to be characterized. Current ontologies assume that they enjoy some sorts of non-physical, artefactual nature. How is then possible for different agents to share the same information object if they are non-physical items? In the talk we dig into the ontological analysis of information objects with the ultimate purpose of defining a principled ontology for their representation. From a methodological perspective, we rely on both philosophical theories developed in formal ontology, and concept theories developed in cognitive sciences. By the end of the talk we show how the proposed analysis can support data modeling through Semantic Web ontologies in context of the ReSeed project