From: Daniel P. O'D. <dan...@gm...> - 2009-08-11 19:52:04
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Hi Michele (and of course others), Thanks very much! It looks like we're going to put in for funding to hold a workshop/conference on "Towards an Ontology of Anglo-Saxon England" for some time in 2010/early 2011. The idea would be to get some key people together to throw around position papers on whether and what we could do to really work together on such issues. And then we could all go skiing or hiking ;) The first principle of the workshop is that Anglo-Saxonists have a long history of standardising systems like this and that we may be building sufficient critical mass to make it worthwhile to look into a longish-term and ambitious proposal here as well. Exactly the type of issues you mention here are the things we'd need to consider. Perhaps once we've got a first draft of the proposal done, I could circulate it for (non-laughing) critical comment among a select group of interested readers? -dan -dan Michele Pasin wrote: > Hi Dan, > > sorry for not getting in touch earlier on, but as a matter of fact > here at CCH we are investigating such issues! We have several > databases full of Anglo-Saxon related data and are now looking at the > best approach for their integration. [1] > > I have a background in knowledge engineering so I'm personally and > theoretically interested in building a formal ontology for this domain > - and this is indeed one of the solutions we are considering for the > data integration problem we have. > However, I totally agree with Patrick when he says that "what > technology you *should* use depends upon *your* requirements". In > order to remain faithful to this 'technological agnosticism' we're > also investigating the less Semantic Web oriented solutions to the > problem, e.g., what has been done for years in the database community > *without* RDF and company. > > The bottom line is, imho there's space for interesting collaborations > here! Maybe we should put up a webpage/working group about it..? > > Regards, > > Michele Pasin > > > > ++++++++ > > [1] A recent presentation I gave touches on this topics: > http://www.box.net/shared/rp3tq2n5f5 > > > > On 17 Jul 2009, at 17:58, Daniel Paul O'Donnell wrote: > >> As part of a project for which we are seeking funding >> (http://www.visionarycross.org/), we are looking into using ontologies >> as the basis for building a generalisable platform for connecting >> representations of Anglo-Saxon cultural objects, tropes, texts, and the >> like (the specific details of this approach, which we've been developing >> over the last year, are still too nascent to be reflected in the >> website). The idea would be to see if there might not be a way of >> building a common, discipline-wide, set of minimal ontological >> distinctions that museums, literary and historical scholars, >> archaeologists, etc. could then use to place their particular objects of >> study in the larger context of the work of everybody else who has used >> the same ontology. >> >> If any other groups are working on the use of ontologies to represent >> any aspect of the study of Anglo-Saxon England, I'd very much like to >> hear from you. I suspect at the moment people working on this are mostly >> likely to be in museums, libraries, or archaeology, but could be wrong. >> I'm considering putting together a grant application that would help >> fund the development of common standards and systems. Of course, with >> ISAS coming up, their might be some opportunities to meet in the next >> fortnight as well. Obviously at this stage, the idea is still fairly >> exploratory. > > > > > > > > > > ____________________________ > Dr. Michele Pasin, Researcher > Centre for Computing in the Humanities > King's College, London > http://staff.cch.kcl.ac.uk/~mpasin/ > > > > > > > -- Daniel Paul O'Donnell Associate Professor of English University of Lethbridge Chair and CEO, Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/) Co-Chair, Digital Initiatives Advisory Board, Medieval Academy of America President-elect (English), Society for Digital Humanities/Société pour l'étude des médias interactifs (http://sdh-semi.org/) Founding Director (2003-2009), Digital Medievalist Project (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/) Vox: +1 403 329-2377 Fax: +1 403 382-7191 (non-confidental) Home Page: http://people.uleth.ca/~daniel.odonnell/ |