Group Project

An Information Sciences and Technology

Ph.D. Comprehensive Exam (Proposal Defense)

“The Ontology of Tags”

by

Mr. David Saab

Candidate for the Ph.D. degree in the

College of Information Sciences and Technology

Committee Chair – Fred Fonseca

Committee Members – Andrea Tapia, Michael McNeese

and Richard Doyle (English)

Thursday, June 12, 2008

9:00 a.m.

201A IST Building

ISTwordmarksolid

Abstract:

Formal ontologies are complex forms of metadata that specify the underlying concepts and their relationships that comprise the information in an information system. Information scientists create ontologies and metadata in order to facilitate the sharing of meaningful information. The most common understanding of ontology in computer and information sciences is Gruber’s "specification of a conceptualization." This definition has held firm in the domains of information science and computer science. However, formal ontologies are problematic in that they simultaneously overspecify and decontextualize information, which in order to be meaningful must be adaptive in context.

In this thesis we introduce the notion of culture to information science as a way of achieving that contextualized adaptability for ontologies. Rather than rely Aristotelian ontology-as-categorization and formal ontologies’ structuring as logical formalisms, we base our understanding of ontology in Heidegger’s phenomenological perspective. Heidegger's notion of being-in-the-world is one in which each of us is immersed in and never separate from an experiential context. This context is the ever-present background that shapes our semantic and ontological commitments to the world around us—helps us make meaning of what we perceive to exist. Moreover, we are always being-in-becoming, experiencing the world as emergent—dynamic, contextualized and with a personal historical perspective. It is this notion of being-in-becoming that allows us to introduce the notion of culture to the study of ontology in information science.

Its role in the creation of meaning makes culture integral to the study of semantics and, consequently, the study of ontologies and information technologies. Based on our understanding of ontologies as cultural schemas, we introduce the notion of creating schematic ontologies with folksonomic tags. We then take this foundation and propose a research agenda in which we explore the use of tag sets as the ontic representations of the underlying ontological conceptualizations, focusing on the phenomenon of collaboration and the process of schema integration in an intercultural research context.