RESEARCH / Projects / PhiloSURFical
START DATE: Oct 2004
END DATE: Nov 2008
URL: http://philosurfical.open.ac.uk/
URL: http://philosurfical.open.ac.uk/tour.html
END DATE: Nov 2008
URL: http://philosurfical.open.ac.uk/
URL: http://philosurfical.open.ac.uk/tour.html
This is the project I developed during my PhD at the Knowledge Media Institute, Open University, UK. In a nutshell, PhiloSURFical is a tool for browsing a philosophical text, taking advantage of a map of the concepts relevant to the text. More generally, PhiloSURFical is a prototype application built to experiment some functionalities which are enabled by the fastly growing Semantic Web: data are distributed, but can be coherently recollected by means of their semantic description.
The PhiloSURFical application is being prototyped with Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and it allows the navigation of a semantically enhanced version of the text.
By relying on an ontology created to describe the philosophical domain at various levels of abstraction, users can benefit from multiple perspectives on the text and on related resources. For example, they can reorganize the same text according to the relevance of a single topic, e.g. the concept of "logical-independence"; they can query the knowledge base or other repositories in the Semantic Web, such as the DBpedia, by choosing an object of interest (i.e. a philosophical school) and using it to trigger a theoretical narrative (i.e. meta-historical), a historical narrative, or a geographical one.
The papers section of this website contains several articles about this work, but mostly, you should look at this article on Synthese for an in-depth discussion of the ontology, and this book chapter for a more e-learning perspective.
My Role
Project creation; project management; system analysis and design; web application development.
By relying on an ontology created to describe the philosophical domain at various levels of abstraction, users can benefit from multiple perspectives on the text and on related resources. For example, they can reorganize the same text according to the relevance of a single topic, e.g. the concept of "logical-independence"; they can query the knowledge base or other repositories in the Semantic Web, such as the DBpedia, by choosing an object of interest (i.e. a philosophical school) and using it to trigger a theoretical narrative (i.e. meta-historical), a historical narrative, or a geographical one.
The papers section of this website contains several articles about this work, but mostly, you should look at this article on Synthese for an in-depth discussion of the ontology, and this book chapter for a more e-learning perspective.
My Role
Project creation; project management; system analysis and design; web application development.
