InPhO @ Work: Providing Integrated Access to Philosophy

FAIN: PW-50401-09

Trustees of Indiana University (Bloomington, IN 47405-7000)
Colin Allen (Project Director: August 2008 to May 2012)

A research and development project to design an online ontology for the field of philosophy and to develop tools for managing metacontent in a dynamic reference work.

The Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project combines human expertise and software analysis to dynamically generate a computational ontology for the domain of philosophy. Our project uses a combination of statistically-generated suggestions and user feedback to create an ontology for the discipline of philosophy, which we plan to deploy in various applications including ontology-guided cross-referencing, search, and visualization for digital philosophy reference works. Our proposal fosters integrated access and interoperability between digital philosophy projects generically and specifically, including the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Noesis, Wikipedia, and the Philosophy Family Tree. Our goal is achieved through publication and regular updates of InPhO data, made available through publication of the ontology and an API to our database. Thus we provide a metadata backbone that other developers of open access digital philosophy projects may build upon.