At NA-CAP 2007, we were introduced to The Indiana Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO), which is developing a dynamic formal ontology for philosophy. A main focus of the project is developing a way to handle metadata for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). As many of you know, the current SEP entries are searchable and listed alphabetically. With InPhO, they should soon appear in hierarchies, with narrower entries (e.g., higher-order thought) falling under broader categories (e.g., consciousness).
The beauty of InPhO is that it’s continually updated by running statistics over SEP entries to identify likely relationships between terms. It also uses a bit of expert input to refine these relationships.
At the moment, we’re talking to Colin Allen and Cameron Buckner about using InPhO to taxonomize publication information, including dissertations. This has several upshots:
- It eliminates the need for us to create yet another keyword hierarchy in philosophy. That should keep down online clutter and free up our time to work on other parts of Phylo.
- It will standardize ontology across Phylo and SEP, which should make searching different sources easier.
- It guarantees that any keyword in Phylo has corresponding information available through SEP.
We’ll keep you updated as things develop with InPhO. In meantime, you can browse the first iteration of the ontology at http://inpho.cogs.indiana.edu:16080/taxonomy/.
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