Building Time-Affordable Cultural Ontologies Using an Emic Approach (original) (raw)
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A clustering-based semi-automated technique to build cultural ontologies
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2009
This article presents and validates a clustering-based method for creating cultural ontologies for community-oriented information systems. The introduced semi-automated approach merges distributed annotation techniques, or subjective assessments of similarities between cultural categories, with established clustering methods to produce "cognate" ontologies. This approach is validated against a locally-authentic ethnographic method, involving direct work with communities for the design of "fluid" ontologies. The evaluation is conducted with of a set of Native American communities located in San Diego County (CA, USA). The principal aim of this research is to discover whether distributing the annotation process among isolated respondents would enable ontology hierarchies to be created that are similar to those that are crafted according to collaborative ethnographic processes, found to be effective in generating continuous usage across several studies. Our findings suggest that the proposed semi-automated solution best optimizes between issues of interoperability and scaleability, de-emphasized in the fluid ontology approach, and sustainable usage. Section 1. Introduction The ubiquity of digital portals for cultures and communities has begun to add a "cultural" question to the usability debate. This question focuses on the idea that usability cannot simply be reduced to the interaction a "neutral" individual has with a system, but that the system's interface, ontologies, and deployment all must consider the larger social and cultural context within which the user is embedded
Towards the Cultural Knowledge Ontology
2015 IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration, 2015
Ontologies are reusable artifacts within the Software Engineering filed that are a pillar of the Semantic Web. Created in a different context, they can be adapted and applied in another context. This paper endeavors to develop a knowledge base in the form of an ontology that formalizes all aspects to do with culture and thus contribute to the preservation and dissemination of cultural knowledge. Written in the context of a small African country (Botswana), the ontology is expected to be generic enough to be adaptable and reusable in the global context. Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, defined by everything from language, livelihoods, religion, traditional medicine, cuisine, social habits, music and arts. Culture is transmitted orally from father to son, mother to daughter or teacher to a student. However, this knowledge is gradually lost as many young people migrate to popular culture. The absence of tools and technologies that aide in the preservation and dissemination of cultural knowledge lead to the gradual loss of cultural valuable information that could be useful for tourism, and learning. Information currently representing elements that define culture is dispersed, heterogeneous, disjointed, in varying stages of formalization and digitization, and distributed in collections of different memory organizations at different locations. As a solution, this paper introduces ontologies to formulate an efficient way to preserve and represent cultural knowledge. The benefits of the cultural ontology include; reuse, sharing, and portability of knowledge across platforms. Overall, the cultural knowledge ontology leads to a better understanding of concepts in the cultural domain and to a more effective and efficient way of handling information about concepts in the cultural knowledge domain.
Structuring the Cultural Domain with an Upper Ontology of Culture
Perspectives and Models
Study of cultural similarities and differences is an important research topic for many disciplines such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, museology, communication, management and business. This presents many potential opportunities for Information Technology specialists to develop culturally-aware technology, but it also raises the risk of inconsistent approaches of the cultural domain. In this chapter, the authors present the fundamental concepts of the Upper Ontology of Culture (UOC), a formal conceptualization of the cultural domain they developed by identifying the common backbone of culture-related disciplines and activities. As a neutral, theory-driven, and interdisciplinary conceptualization, the UOC shall provide guidelines for the development of culturally-aware applications, for the consistent computerization of cultural data and their interoperability, as well as for the development of culture-driven automatic reasoning processes.
knowledge modeling < knowledge engineering < artificial intelligence < computer applications < computer operations < (activities and operations), organization of information < information operations < (activities and operations), classification < organization of information < information operations < (activities and operations) This article presents and validates a cluster-based method for creating cultural ontologies for community-oriented information systems. The introduced semi-automated approach merges distributed annotation techniques, or subjective assessments of similarities between cultural categories, with established clustering methods to produce "cognate" ontologies. This approach is validated against a locally-authentic ethnographic method, involving direct work with communities for the design of "fluid" ontologies. The evaluation is conducted with of a set of Native American communities located in San Diego County (CA, USA). The principal aim of this research is to discover whether distributing the annotation process among isolated respondents would enable ontology hierarchies to be created that are similar to those that are crafted according to collaborative ethnographic processes, found to be effective in generating continuous usage across several studies. Our findings suggest that the proposed semi-automated solution best optimizes between issues of interoperability and scaleability, de-emphasized in the fluid ontology approach, and sustainable usage.
Towards a Semantic Web for Culture
Journal of Digital Information, 2004
Today's semantic web deals with meaning in a very restricted sense and offers static solutions. This is adequate for many scientific, technical purposes and for business transactions requiring machine-to-machine communication, but does not answer the needs of culture. Science, technology and business are concerned primarily with the latest findings, the state of the art, i.e. the paradigm or dominant world-view of the day. In this context, history is considered non-essential because it deals with things that are out of date. By contrast, culture faces a much larger challenge, namely, to represent changes in ways of knowing; changing meanings in different places at a given time (synchronically) and over time (diachronically). Culture is about both objects and the commentaries on them; about a cumulative body of knowledge; about collective memory and heritage. Here, history plays a central role and older does not mean less important or less relevant. Hence, a Leonardo painting that is 400 years old, or a Greek statue that is 2500 years old, typically have richer commentaries and are often more valuable than their contemporary equivalents. In this context, the science of meaning (semantics) is necessarily much more complex than semantic primitives. A semantic web in the cultural domain must enable us to trace how meaning and knowledge organisation have evolved historically in different cultures. This paper examines five issues to address this challenge: 1) different world-views (i.e. a shift from substance to function and from ontology to multiple ontologies); 2) developments in definitions and meaning; 3) distinctions between words and concepts; 4) new classes of relations; and 5) dynamic models of knowledge organisation. These issues reveal that historical dimensions of cultural diversity in knowledge organisation are also central to classification of biological diversity. New ways are proposed of visualizing knowledge using a time/space horizon to distinguish between universals and particulars. It is suggested that new visualization methods make possible a history of questions as well as of answers, thus enabling dynamic access to cultural and historical dimensions of knowledge. Unlike earlier media, which were limited to recording factual dimensions of collective memory, digital media enable us to explore theories, ways of perceiving, ways of knowing; to enter into other mindsets and world-views and thus to attain novel insights and new levels of tolerance. Some practical consequences are outlined. The problem of whether the machine is alive or not is, for our purposes semantic and we are at liberty to answer it one way or the other as best suits our convenience. As Humpty Dumpty says about some of his more remarkable words: "I pay them extra and make them do what I want." Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings 1 Parallel with these developments was a diagram to explain how the semantic web was to be achieved. Understandably, in its earliest versions in 1997, it was quite primitive (figure 1). 7 The essential idea was quite clear. One began with a basis of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which provided structure or syntax. On top of this was a layer for the Resource Description Framework (RDF) that promised to provide semantics or meaning. Alongside there would be SGML, XML and RDF applications, a Protocol for Internet Content Selection (PICS) and privacy features (P3P). Each year, new features were added to the ever growing "layer cake." By XML 2000 this was called the "Semantic Web Wedding Cake" 8 (figure 2). Even so problems remained in deciding how much XML would accomplish and to what extent one needed to relegate functionalities to RDF. The minor detail that precise contents of RDF had not yet been defined made this challenge more elusive. These details, it was explained would soon be resolved using Schemas. So XML schemas and RDF Schemas entered the limelight briefly. Meanwhile, the fundamentals of the cake also shifted from SGML and XML to Unicode plus Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). 9 Many in the WWW community were unaware that within the Internet Society (ISOC), Larry Masinter 10 had disbanded the original Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF URI) committee because the challenges of URIs were too formidable. 11 Primitive Informal Meaning English Example Existence Something exists. There is a dog. Coreference Something is the same as something. The dog is my pet. Relation Something is related to something. The dog has fleas. Conjunction A and B. The dog is running, and the dog is barking. Negation Not A. The dog is not sleeping.
Using Web-Based Knowledge Extraction Techniques to Support Cultural Modeling
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011
The World Wide Web is a potentially valuable source of information about the cognitive characteristics of cultural groups. However, attempts to use the Web in the context of cultural modeling activities are hampered by the large-scale nature of the Web and the current dominance of natural language formats. In this paper, we outline an approach to support the exploitation of the Web for cultural modeling activities. The approach begins with the development of qualitative cultural models (which describe the beliefs, concepts and values of cultural groups), and these models are subsequently used to develop an ontology-based information extraction capability. Our approach represents an attempt to combine conventional approaches to information extraction with epidemiological perspectives of culture and network-based approaches to cultural analysis. The approach can be used, we suggest, to support the development of models providing a better understanding of the cognitive characteristics of particular cultural groups.
Ontologies-Based Platform for Sociocultural Knowledge Management
Journal on Data Semantics, 2016
In this paper, we present a sociocultural platform aiming at persevering and capitalizing sociocultural events in Senegal. This platform relies on Semantic Web technologies. First, we discuss the two ontologies we provided to support our platform: an upper-level sociocultural ontology (USCO) and a human time ontology (HuTO). To build our upper-level ontology we proposed a methodology based on the theory of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky called "Vygotskian Framework". We also present how the upper-level ontology can be matched in the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud. On the other hand, we present the Human Time Ontology (HuTO) of which major contributions are (i) the modeling of non-convex intervals (repetitive interval) like every Monday, (ii) representation deictic temporal expressions which form specific relations with time speech and (iii) qualitative temporal notions which are temporal notions relative to a culture or a geographical position. Finally, we discuss the platform designed on top of Semantic MediaWiki to apply our scientific contributions. indeed, the platform allows Senegalese communities to share and co-construct their sociocultural knowledge.
The role of culture in collaborative ontology design
Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Intelligent Semantic Web-Services and Applications - ISWSA '11, 2011
This paper explores the cultural implications in ontology engineering. It focuses more particularly on collaborative design. Hypotheses are formulated concerning the influence of cultural differences in the definition of ontology, its conceptual organisation and the design process. A preliminary analysis conducted on six well known collaborative systems confirms some of the findings. We argue that a "culture aware" attitude may be of great importance for the development of systems (e.g. web services) that, more or less implicitly, adopt ontologies and for supporting the processes of cross cultural collaborative design.
How Culture May Influence Ontology Co-Design
International Journal of Information Technology and Web Engineering, 2011
This article addresses the issue of cultural influence in ontology design and reuse. The main assumption is that an ontology is not only a socio-technical artefact but also a cultural artefact. It contains embedded assumptions, core values, points of view, beliefs, thought patterns, etc. Based on results already found in several design fields the authors formulate some preliminary hypotheses about the possible relationships existing between culture and features of design process and produced ontology. A critical and qualitative analysis of six collaborative design systems has been performed to test some of the hypotheses, confirming some of the findings. The authors argue that a “culture aware” attitude may be of great importance for supporting the processes of cross cultural collaborative ontology design and the internalization and localization of these kinds of artefacts.