Information Studies

Ontology has a philosophical and an epistemological dimension. The former position addresses social and cultural knowledge from the standpoint of temporality while the latter describes representation and organizational aspects of cultural and social concepts for later retrieval. The epistemological standpoint falls within the domain of information science and information systems and the philosophical position underpins our theoretical assumptions and ideas about existence. Thus ontological assumptions frame not only our understanding of reality, but also direct our epistemological approach. An epistemological standpoint is how we come to gain knowledge. In designing systems for representing, organizing, and retrieving information it is ontology taken in its epistemological sense that reveals the first realities which deal with the fundamental categories of object, state of affairs, part, whole, etc, as well as the relations between parts and the whole and their laws of dependence Here ontology is taken to be “an explicit specification of a shared conceptualization”. It is how the term is used in artificial intelligence (AI) and knowledge representation. In computer science and information science, ontology is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the properties of that domain, and may be used to define the domain. “Ontology is used in AI, the Semantic Web, systems engineering, software engineering, biomedical informatics, library science, enterprise bookmarking, and information architecture as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it” (Wikipedia). Ontology in AI refers to an engineering artifact, constituted by a specific vocabulary used to describe a certain reality, plus a set of explicit assumptions regarding the intended meaning of the vocabulary words. This set of assumptions has usually the form of a first-order logical theory, where vocabulary words appear as unary or binary predicate names, respectively called concepts and relations. In the simplest case, ontology describes a hierarchy of concepts related by subsumption relationships; in more sophisticated cases, suitable axioms are added in order to express other relationships between concepts and to constrain their intended interpretation. The creation of domain ontologies is also fundamental to the definition and use of an enterprise architecture framework. From another point of view ontology is considered as an enabling technology for the Semantic Web. It assists in stating the connotation/meaning of the data that one may generate or use or share with other information seekers. Here ontology enables people to state what they mean by the terms used in data/information that they generate, share, or use. Folksonomies are an emergent phenomenon of the Social Web. They arise from data about how people associate terms with content that they generate, share, or use. Further as the Semantic Web matures and the Social Web grows, there is greater value in applying Semantic Web technologies to the data of the Social Web. To overcome confusions that may arise due to socio-cultural differences in expressing time there is a need for ontology of Socio-cultural Time Expressions (SCTE) The purpose of such an ontology is “to explicitly and formally describe these context dependent temporal expressions.

This is done by defining appropriate hierarchical categories to which the expressions will be assigned. The ultimate goal is to be able to develop context aware temporal applications for the Web such as calendars or appointment schedulers. Most information systems are dynamic. The arrival of Internet and Web sites has revolutionized the entire field of information creation, processing and delivery. Whatever be the type of information system, the fundamental task in designing the system is how we represent knowledge/information. In other words it means how we represent concepts.

At any given period of time, the cultural and social life of a society is greatly influenced by its philosophy, religion, and belief systems. It is in this milieu concepts and knowledge develop. Thus, philosophical and religious realities of the period provide the essential background for studying the cultural and social knowledge in a given society as affected by time. This is particularly so in the case of East Asian countries such as India, whose cultures and philosophies are rich with concepts relating to Time because of their long cultural heritage.

Aslo discussed are the roles/functions of knowledge organization tools (KOT) in information systems and services and some of the principal steps in building a KOT and the problems that arise especially in dealing with multilingual, multicultural resources.

Various modes of formation of subjects, especially interdisciplinary subjects, are explained. Also considers some problems in handling multilingual contents with examples. Interoperability across databases (single language and multi-language) is elaborated.