Barry Smith is a prominent contributor to both theoretical and applied research in ontology. He is the author of many publications on ontology and related topics. In particular, the Basic Formal Ontology is a widely used top level model in the scientific community.

I’m a bit surprised that there was no mention whatsoever of the work I did a while back in the context of the PhiloSURFIcal project. Built as part my PhD, the PhiloSURFIcal software tool allowed to navigate a philosophical text, taking advantage of a map of the concepts relevant to the text. The map, in this case, relied on a rather generic ontology for philosophy, which I instantiated using concepts from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

At the time I could not find evidence for any other ontology modelling the philosophical domain, and still to this day I haven’t seen any that provides the same level of detail in modeling out the various nuances of philosophical ideas.

Admittedly, the OWL formalization wasn’t very good (in fact I originally implemented the ontology using a KR language called OCML). Maybe though I should take this as an incentive to revive this work and publish it again using a more modern Linked Data approach!

A detailed summary of the modeling approach can be found here:

Michele Pasin, Enrico Motta. Ontological Requirements for Annotation and Navigation of Philosophical Resources – Synthese, Volume 182, Number 2, Springer September 2011 .

In any case, here’s a few interesting links and slides from Barry Smith’s presentation:

Major changes:

• the site now works at 1024×830 (it should be enough for supporting the majority of screens)
• the pathways section now works primarily by using a hypertext interface – the java applet I was using for the visualization of the pathways is not automatically loaded anymore, but just on demand by clicking a button. This will prevent it from slowing down the whole site.
• refined the help mechanisms and other little things throughout the site

Still to do: various things, but mainly NOT at the interface level. Basically getting more data (if possible) into the KB, refining the pathways creation process, refining the annotations of the Tractatus and making the whole KB available in OWL (along with the ontology, which is already available).

Thanks to all the people who’ve emailed me with correction/suggestions!! :-)

just two news: PhiloSURFical development is proceeding well (had a lot of positive feedback at the Wittgenstein Symposium) and it has a simple but shiny new site. And secondly – there’s a tabbed version of the Tractatus I’ve made using the Wittgenstein knowledge base… can be useful to somebody, as it makes visually very clear the hierarchical structure of the text, try it out and leave a comment if you like it. The final version of the ontology-based tool should be finished in a month or so (the last famous words..) ..

It has been a last minute invitation for PhiloSURFical, but it’s even more appreciated! And by peeping at the conference program, I realized there’s another hypertextual version of the Tractatus: the one created by Luciano Bazzochi from the university of Pisa…