Ontology of Culture

Do you have a conversation topic that doesn't seem to fit any of the other conversations? Here is where we discuss ANYTHING about Joseph Campbell, comparative mythology, and more!

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tonyd
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Ontology of Culture

Post by tonyd »

There are different ways of looking at things depending on whether the viewpoint you choose is christian, capitalist, marxist, feminist, neoplatonist or some other. Such viewpoints may begin to become enshrined in how data is structured on the web in the near future due to the advent of linked-data, a sort of shadow web of data that can be accessed by anyone (if you know how to find it) and which can have an ontological structure.

This is an involved topic and from a Campbellian point of view one worth kicking around for a few years before arriving at any conclusions. I'm not sure if there will be much interest in this sort of stuff but as an test case I've started an ontology that, using Campbell's corpus as a blueprint, tries to structure cultural data. The project is Mythology2 on Stanford's webprotege.

I'm not sure if there would be an interest in collaborating long term on such a project as it is one that requires various areas of expertise and would keep most of us out of our comfort zone for quite a while.

Linked Open Cloud (LOD) data: http://lod-cloud.net/versions/2014-08-30/lod-cloud.svg

For those interested to see how this sort of data is accessed go to: http://dbpedia.org/snorql/

and in the white box remove what's there and paste in:

Code: Select all

PREFIX dbo: http://dbpedia.org/ontology/
PREFIX yago: http://dbpedia.org/class/yago/
SELECT ?fairytale ?abstract
WHERE
 { ?fairytale a yago:Fairytale107222581 .
 ?fairytale dbo:abstract ?abstract .
 FILTER (regex(?fairytale, "king","i"))
 FILTER (! regex(?fairytale, "daughter","i"))
 FILTER(lang(?abstract)="en")

 }
ORDER BY ?fairytale
enclosing the two web addresses on the first two lines in '<' and '>' as in the prefixes already listed (they do not come out if I add them here).

Basically this query looks for things that have as 'object' the yago fairy tale category and an associated abstract if it exists. It looks for 'king' in the title but discards tales with 'daughter' and, as it would return all language versions, we confine it to 'en', or english results. The '?' denotes a variable name and the 'WHERE' clause always consists of triples of subject-predicate-object type which are joined by '.' Play with it, there is nothing to break!

This sort of thing did form part of Tim Berners-Lee's original vision for the web.
Tony D.
Fare Forward

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