Ontologies and technologies: knowledge representation or misrepresentation

ABSTRACT

The development of the Semantic Web (SW) raises a number of difficult and interesting technical issues. Less often remarked, however, are the social and political debates that it will engender, if and when the technologies become widely accepted. As the SW is a technology for transferring information and knowledge efficiently and effectively, then many of these questions have an epistemological base. In this paper I want to focus especially on the epistemological underpinnings of these social issues, to think about the interaction between the epistemological and the political. How does technology affect the social networks in which it is embedded? How can technology be successfully transplanted into a new context? And, perhaps most importantly for us, how is technology affected by its context? In particular, I want to look at how our decisions about how we treat knowledge can impact quite dramatically on the technologies we produce.

REFERENCES

• 1: Christopher Brewster & Kieron O'Hara (2004) 'Knowledge representation with ontologies: the present and future', IEEE Intelligent Systems 19(1), 72--73.
• 2: Simon Buckingham Shum (2004) 'Contentious, dynamic, multimodal domains ... and ontologies?', IEEE Intelligent Systems 19(1), 80--81.
• 3: B. Chandrasekaran (1983) 'Towards a taxonomy of problem solving types', AI Magazine 4(1), 9--17.
• 4: William J. Clancey, Heuristic classification, Artificial Intelligence, v.27 n.3, p.289-350, Dec. 1985 [doi>10.1016/0004-3702(85)90016-5]
• 5: Robin Cowan, Paul A. David & Dominique Foray (1999) 'The explicit economics of knowledge codification and tacitness' presented at the 3rd TIPIK Workshop, BETA, University of Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, 24th April, 1999, <u>http://wwwecon.stanford.edu/faculty/workp/swp99027.pdf.</u>
• 6: Jeremy Ellman (2004) 'Corporate ontologies as information interfaces', IEEE Intelligent Systems 19(1), 79--80.
• 7: Steve Fuller, Knowledge Management Foundations, Butterworth-Heinemann, Newton, MA, 2001
• 8: Ikujiro Nonaka & Hirotaka Takeuchi (1995) The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation, Oxford University Press, New York.
• 9: Kieron O'Hara (2002) Plato and the Internet, Icon Books, Cambridge.
• 10: Kieron O'Hara , Nigel Shadbolt , Gertjan Van Heijst, Generalized directive models: integrating model development and knowledge acquisition, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, v.49 n.4, p.497-522, Oct. 1, 1998 [doi>10.1006/ijhc.1998.0216]
• 11: CS AKTive Space, or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Semantic Web, IEEE Intelligent Systems, v.19 n.3, p.41-47, May 2004 [doi>10.1109/MIS.2004.8]
• 12: Gertjan van Heijst (1995) The Role of Ontologies in Knowledge Engineering, PhD thesis, Dept. of Social Science Informatics, University of Amsterdam.
• 13: B. J. Wielinga , A. Th. Schreiber , J. A. Breuker, KADS: a modelling approach to knowledge engineering, Knowledge Acquisition, v.4 n.1, p.5-53, March 1992 [doi>10.1016/1042-8143(92)90013-Q]