Discovery: philosophy in the digital Era

It looks like the semantic web rumor is spreading out fast, also in the philosophy circles:

Discovery is co-financed by the European Commission under the eContentplus programme and was launched in November 2006. It has a twofold aim:

  1. to prepare an extensive collection of scholarly editions of primary sources and scholarly contributions for the study of philosophy from the Presocratics through modernity; to enrich this material with metadata and develop philosophically informed ontologies that will semantically structure it; and to publish the enriched content via a federation of inter-operable websites called Philosource.
  2. to build an advanced digital workspace for philosophical research using a desktop application – called Philospace – with which scholars can exploit the resources of the Philosource contents and engage in collaborative research projects with optimal efficiency through peer-to-peer (p2p) networking.

Philosource will be the data provider, much like a digital library or archive; Philospace will be an advanced working environment for philosophers, enabling them to perform sophisticated queries, apply inference rules and, above all, semantically enrich the data published on the websites. The Philosource federation will rely on the stringent peer review standards traditionally used in academic publishing for quality control, while Philospace will be an open venue with user-selected filtering for information management. Philospace will overlie and extend Philosource, enriching its content with non-reviewed information. Scholars working in Philospace will be able to submit the results of their research to Philosource for peer review and, if successful, publication.

The software underlying both Philosource and Philospace will be based on the extension and adaptation of already existing Open Source applications, primarily Hyper and Dbin

Looking forward to seeing some results there!

 

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