I welcome you to my presentation, my name is Amelie Cernaveba, my colleague Alois Pichler cannot be there today.
We both work at the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen.
Today I will give you a small presentation to the Wittgenstein Ontology we developed at Bergen.
And I will show you how we developed it and created it and of course why.
Just to give you a short overview what it is done at the Wittgenstein Archives before.
So the intention of the Wittgenstein Archives is to make the work of this philosopher more available to give access to his manuscript.
We now have the so-called Bergen electronic edition and the Wittgenstein source which is available also on the web.
And just to give you also some numbers, we have 20,000 pages of manuscripts and typescripts of Wittgenstein's Nachlas.
So now we thought that it is good to prepare Wittgenstein for the Semantic Web so it can be better available and to offer possibilities to get deeper insights in his work and his intertextual relations.
In the Wittgenstein Ontology we want to offer interlinked browsing between philosophical concepts on the one hand and primary sources of Wittgenstein and secondary sources about his work so that it can be done.
So the major challenge when creating the Wittgenstein Ontology is that his work is rather highly dynamic, multifaceted and in continuous development.
Everything changes every time. So just to give you a small example, if it comes to the concept meaning in some places at Wittgenstein's work it can mean reference or rules or uses and practice or even atmosphere of work.
And as you see here in the circle, Tarktakus is one piece of Wittgenstein's work and here the...
So you have the Tarktakus and there the term A is affirmed and the term B also is affirmed but when it comes to the remarks on logical form A is denied and B is still affirmed.
So this causes a lot of conflicts. So how can such challenge be dealt with in ontologies? Our solution was to develop ontology that permits different views and approaches so that we can handle these kind of conflicts.
And we also ask how can we apply ontology for such dynamic content? So I have to say we regard ontologies as options to document, explicate and share models.
So this gives us the opportunity to allow disagreements in this model and we think this is an excellent tool for disagreement to make it visible, shareable and debatable.
When we designed the ontology we wanted to support the usage of these texts and to keep this specific context of Wittgenstein in mind. We also wanted to create an environment for the Wittgenstein archives and its partners as well as for example teaching classes on Tarktakus and research.
And the first version of that ontology was developed during the so-called discovery project and it's now going on in further projects.
So now I'm coming to do the description of that ontology. On the main level we have the class source and it's divided into primary sources so of the Wittgenstein's work and secondary sources.
And the primary source at its lowest level is preserved for the so-called Wittgenstein remark or called Bermerkung.
And of course the secondary source class is preserved for the papers about Wittgenstein. On the other side we have the class subject and it contains intertextual relations, interpretations and philosophical debate.
The subject branch is divided into issue, point, perspective and field. Issue refers to subjects of Wittgenstein himself in this research field. Points refers to the mentioned remarks and it includes the reader's interpretation.
Perspective refers to a specific stand on relation of issues and points. So you can see it like a filtering or grouping of issue point. Field then refers or it was developed to connect the Wittgenstein domain with others with other domains like aesthetics and so on.
So we also believe that properties in that ontologies are key because we are able to allow the inter-linkage between all these concepts. I mentioned some purposes here as has point denies point.
In addition we introduced also a multilingual dimension so that people are able to get access in their preferred language. We already have instances in German and English and Danish will be added soon and I think there will be more languages.
So to conclude I have to say that this ontology is not completely finished yet so it's still in the beginning especially the subject branch we have to work on more.
When we worked on that ontology a key task was and still is to reflect the dynamic and manifold work of Wittgenstein. Therefore we created the class perspective. This gives us a lot of freedom while the model is still valid.
By using properties the inter-linkage can also be managed which is important for the Wittgenstein research.
In summary this enables fast studies and give us and other researchers a comprehensive platform to share and debate the Wittgenstein's work.
These kind of challenges we regarded for us as an opportunity rather than a hindrance. Thanks for your attention.