InPhO: the Indiana Philosophy Ontology project

FAIN: HD-50203-07

Trustees of Indiana University (Bloomington, IN 47405-7000)
Colin Allen (Project Director: April 2007 to June 2009)

Development of software to automate searching, navigating, and representing the relations among philosophical ideas, scholars, and works.

The Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project aims to build and maintain a "dynamic ontology" for the discipline of Philosophy and to deploy this ontology in a variety of Digital Philosophy applications. Software that can extract meaningful content from ever-growing digital sources is verified and trained by expert feedback so as to build and manage a machine-readable representation of the relations among philosophical ideas and thinkers. Application testbeds include the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) and Noesis: Philosophical Research Online. The specific outcome of this startup proposal will be to integrate the InPhO system with editorial and authoring interfaces to the SEP. The dynamic ontology can provide numerous benefits for scholars, students and members of the general public, all of whom seek better tools for searching, navigating, and visualizing the relations among philosophical ideas, scholars, and their works.