Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
‒
on the other hand, an
“investigation” of concepts
(or conceptual categories),
which were sufficiently general, explicitly defined, “philosophically sound” and
which were already being used as the bases for other attempts to develop a
metalanguage of description.
The ASW vocabulary of conceptual terms is a
descriptive ontology
or, to use
B. Bachimont's expression [BAC 05]
11
, an ontology
in the epistemological sense
(as
opposed to a
formal
or
categorial ontology
), based on the concrete analysis of a
corpus of audiovisual texts documenting a domain of knowledge (on this subject,
see our remarks in Chapter 1 and also [STO 89; STO 96; STO 98]).
The fundamental concepts and the canonic organization of this vocabulary,
however, reflect our desire to make it fairly similar to existing formal (categorial)
ontologies
12
and ultimately to transform it into a formal ontology in the precise sense
that
itisnotdependentonacircumscribedempiricaldomain
of knowledge.
As Bruno Bachimont [BAC 05] rightly points out, a
formal
ontology must be set
apart from a
formalized
ontology (in the mathematical or logical sense of the term).
Thus, the ASW meta-lexicon constitutes an ontology (or rather, part of one) which is
formal but not formalized
, and can be used for concrete descriptive tasks (at a
certain level of granularity) on audiovisual corpora documenting diverse empirical
domains of knowledge which stem from the lifeworld (social, historical, cultural,
natural). As previously explained, the corpora of analyzed audiovisual texts
document three specific domains of expertise: cultural diversity, literary heritage
and archaeology. However, the conceptual terms making up the vocabulary in
question lend themselves more or less easily to the definition and elaboration of
models for analyzing audiovisual corpora which are not directly linked to these three
domains. Yet they lend themselves less well to the analysis of filmic objects which
have a poetic and aesthetic pretention, as is notably the case with fictional
audiovisual works.
There are no more than 1,100 conceptual terms in the set making up the meta-
lexicon which serves to identify and denote the objects of analysis in the ASW
11 Also see the online presentation of B. Bachimont's lecture:
http://www.spim.jussieu.fr/doc/ontologies/Bachimont-SticSante-08122005.pdf.
12 In addition to DOLCE, we also referred to the following ontologies: BFO (
Basic Formal
Ontology
; see http://www.ifomis.org/bfo/); SUMO (
Suggested Upper Merged Ontology
;
see http://www.ontologyportal.org/); OCHRE (Online Cultural Heritage Research
Environment) Core Ontology (http://ochre.lib.uchicago.edu/index_files/Page845.htm), which
is more specialized in questions relating to cultural heritage); the
Conceptual Reference
Model
(CRM) from CIDOC (
Comité International pour la Documentation de l'ICOM
;
see http://www.cidoc-crm.org/scope.html) and GOLD (General Ontology for Linguistic
Description) devoted to research in linguistics (http://linguistics-ontology.org/).
