0.32 Scholarly information management: a proposal  (Page 5/11)

Ontologies

Each of the sites of the Scholarsource Federation should use a very general ontology—The Scholarship Ontology—that expresses the distinction between research objects (primary sources), research results (secondary sources), and the authors of both (scholars). It also describes the kinds of relationships between these sources and their authors, such as “related to,” “describe,” “criticize,” “comment,” etc. The primary sources are what we want to speak about and the secondary sources are the product of the different ways in which scholars can speak about the primary sources. Along with this general ontology each node of the Federation will use narrower domain source ontologies. These more specific ontologies can be bibliographic, specifying the different types of sources used by the community (commentary, articles, critical editions, etc.) or theoretical, expressing the concepts used by the concerned authors and their relationship (philosophical, historical, linguistic, and so on.)

Let’s focus on the Scholarship Ontology. If a scholarly community intends to conduct research on a certain topic, it first needs to define which documents or objects to consider as its primary sources. When a research line is about to be developed and consolidated, a catalogue of primary sources is compiled, usually by archivists or librarians. The catalogue of primary sources lists the relevant classes of objects and often includes the complete list of their instances. For example, in the case of the work of Wittgenstein, scholars interested in studying his philosophy have created a detailed catalogue of his writings, divided according to the different types of documents (books, manuscripts, typescripts...) and including a complete list and description of each manuscript. Catalogues of secondary sources come later, and are written by scholars or librarians, generally in the form of a bibliography listing the most relevant scholarly contributions written on Wittgenstein (editions, monographs, articles, reviews...) existing at a given moment. The distinction between primary and secondary has a fundamental epistemic value. According to Karl Popper, what distinguishes science from other human conversation is the capacity to indicate the conditions of its own falsification. In scholarship, the conditions of falsification normally include the verification of hypotheses on the basis of a collection of documents recognized by a scholarly community as relevant primary sources. Thus we can affirm that the distinction between primary and secondary sources exhibits the conditions for falsifying a theory in the humanities.

The idea of collecting in one place all of the primary and secondary sources needed for conducting research on a given subject is intrinsic to the history of the organisation of knowledge, because scholars and librarians know that it is a very effective means of producing new knowledge. Now, to what extent are the traditional research environments, that is the libraries, able to represent the fundamental distinction between primary and secondary sources and to help researchers orient themselves in the information? Before answering this question, we should mention that even if manuscripts, artifacts and paintings are considered, almost without exception, only as primary sources, most printed documents have no fixed status and can be considered as primary or secondary sources according to different research topics and scholarly communities. For example, an article written by Nietzsche on Plato is a primary source to Nietzsche scholars, but it is a secondary source to Plato scholars. Traditional physical libraries are generally unable to reconfigure the disposition of their books according to the needs of the scholars. Nevertheless, they put in place a certain number of strategies to permit scholars to find their way amongst the mass of collected documents: