Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 408.
            Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
                   Hosted by King's Digital Lab
                       www.dhhumanist.org
                Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org


    [1]    From: Iian Neill 
           Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.398: non-hierarchical concept ontologies? (78)

    [2]    From: Willard McCarty 
           Subject: ontology, ontologies & hierarchy (23)


--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2019-11-14 12:13:31+00:00
        From: Iian Neill 
        Subject: Re: [Humanist] 33.398: non-hierarchical concept ontologies?

Dear Chris,

I don't have any papers to reference on this concept as yet, although I
will be touching on it a forthcoming paper, but in our Codex project we are
exploring the application of something I call "aspect-oriented" ontology to
texts. The name is taken from the use of "aspects" in programming languages
which support attributes applied to classes and methods. Aspects are used
to implement cross-cutting (horizontal) concerns in software -- likewise,
in an "aspect-oriented" ontology there are concepts which can be thought of
as cutting across type classifications. For example, the aspect
"Florentine" may not only apply to persons but to objects, cuisine, schools
of art, etc.

Best regards,
Iian

On Wed, 13 Nov 2019 at 18:29, Humanist  wrote:

>                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 33, No. 398.
>             Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
>                    Hosted by King's Digital Lab
>                        www.dhhumanist.org
>                 Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
>
>
>         Date: 2019-11-12 12:41:17+00:00
>         From: Jan Christophe Meister 
>         Subject: Non-hierarchical concept ontologies
>
> Dear All,
>
> for the next development phase of our text annotation and analysis tool
> CATMA (https://catma.de) we'd like to find out more about the theory,
> the epistemic benefits and the computational approaches toward what we
> have tentatively called "non-hierarchical concept ontologies". Here's why:
>
> In CATMA (as in many other annotation tools that implement markup
> schemata) a concept ontology takes on the form of a tagset, which - in
> the UI as well as conceptually - is presented to the user as a tree
> data-structure.  One of CATMA's core features, however, is the ability
> to extend and modify tagsets 'on the fly' while annotating documents,
> something which our users tend to do quite regularly. And sooner or
> later they then come up with the idea that they would want to re-order
> tags and sub-tags across established parent-child-dependencies.  This is
> where things become interesting not just pragmatically (we use a graph
> data base, so dependencies could in principle be re-calculated and
> re-mapped), but more so conceptually. In this perspective the question
> is not just whether one can fix and/or extend an existing
> structure/ontology - the question is whether one can productively THINK
> a non-hierarchical concept ontology and clearly identify its heuristic
> added value. What exactly is the added value of a 'fact-turned-category'
> derived from a triple-store query, and what are its limits?
>
> Against this backdrop I'd like to ask whether HUMANIST readers could
> point me to philosophical as well as CS approaches - literature,
> projects, etc. - that reflect on the philosophical as well as the
> computational affordances and constraints of concept ontologies that
> might be anything but hierarchically ordered: e.g. networked,
> distributional, probabilistic, etc.
>
> Many thanks,
>
> Chris
>
>
> --------------------------------
> Dr. Jan Christoph Meister
> Universitätsprofessor für Digital Humanities
> Schwerpunkt Deutsche Literatur und Textanalyse
> Institut fü¼r Germanistik
> Universität Hamburg
> Überseering 35
> 22 297 Hamburg
> +49  40 42838 2972
> +49 172 40865 41
> http://jcmeister.de

--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
        Date: 2019-11-14 08:29:25+00:00
        From: Willard McCarty 
        Subject: ontology, ontologies & hierarchy

Chris Meister's question about non-hierarchical concept ontologies leads
me to wonder whether the pluralisation of 'ontology' in the late 1940s
by Quine (who was not unfamiliar with digital logic and computing),
followed by the quiet adoption of the term in computer science much
later, provides some insight. Specifically, might it be the case that by
pluralising the term ontological hierarchy is undermined?

I had occasion to look into the history of 'ontology' for a workshop at
Cambridge in 2017, the outcome of which was published in HAU: Journal of
Ethnographic Theory 9.1 (2017): 147-61. See esp. pp. 149-51.

Should anyone know of material related to 'ontology' in CS or elsewhere
that I did not catch, I'd be grateful to know about it.

Yours,
WM
--
Willard McCarty (www.mccarty.org.uk/),
Professor emeritus, Department of Digital Humanities, King's College
London; Editor, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews
(www.tandfonline.com/loi/yisr20) and Humanist (www.dhhumanist.org)




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