Digitalization of research enables new scientific insights and methods in the Humanities. There are many helpful tools facilitating research as well as establishing new scientific subjects and approaches. However, these new digital objects like electronic editions, encyclopediae, mobile applications or websites representing research projects are not very well-studied and many are not very well known. To fully exploit potentials of digitalization for Philosophy, these digital tools need to be systematized, promoted and improved in accessibility.
In our talk, we will introduce an information infrastructure to index digital objects in scientific philosophy, both existing and forthcoming. The basis is an ontology which unlike existing ontologies in the domain combines domain-specific requirements, such as vocabularies, with ontologies specific to research data and digital objects. While the subject indexing will be based on Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO), we compiled a register of existing digital objects in scientific philosophy mainly from German context in order to deduce the formal requirements of a metadata scheme. Based on those examples, we formulated a bunch of requirements and examined a variety of relevant ontologies, such as Marc21 and DataCite Metadata Schema to find links and constructive mappings. Even though those vocabularies do not cover the requirements completely a widely sufficient scheme has been adopted and modified according to the demanded characteristics.
During the research process we took into account user needs, the FAIR principles and practical considerations, to design an ontology that can serve as the foundation for an information system as well as provide additional information for secondary system.
As implementing the depicted information system is our planned next step, we would welcome the opportunity to discuss our findings with members of the community.