Yesterday afternoon, I delivered a talk to the PhiloWeb Workshop at the WWW2012 Conference titled “Containing the Semantic Explosion” with Cameron Buckner and Colin Allen. It is an overview of the InPhO Project architecture, known as dynamic ontology, and a preview of some forthcoming data mining tools. [slides]

The explosion of semantic data on the information web, and within digital philosophy, requires new techniques for organizing and linking these knowledge repositories. These must address concerns about consistency, completeness, maintenance, usability, and pragmatics, while reducing the cost of double experts trained both in ontology design and the target domain. Folksonomy approaches address concerns about usability and personnel at the expense of consistency, completeness, and maintenance. Upper-level formal ontologies address concerns about consistency and completeness, but require double experts for the initial construction and maintenance of the representation. At the Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) Project, we have developed a general methodology called dynamic ontology, which alleviates the need for double experts, while addressing concerns about consistency, completeness and change through machine learning over a domain corpus, and concerns about usability and pragmatics through human input and semantic web standards. This representation can then be used by other projects in digital philosophy, such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) and PhilPapers, along with resources outside of digital philosophy enabled by the LinkedHumanities project. [slides]