OntoSOC: Sociocultural Knowledge Ontology

In the light of the rhythm of the current cultural mixing, we believe that in the long term, culture of African people in particular may disappear. Some new computational techniques (semantic web technologies) are needed to manage the large repositories of sociocultural data and to discover useful patterns and knowledge from them. This paper presents a virtual activity ontology modeling approach, in the case of sociocultural knowledge sharing and co-construction named Ontoshare. Our modeling approach is based on Engeström's Human Activity Theory (HAT). With Ontoshare we designed how Internet users could build the content of a sociocultural Knowledge Management System (KMS); this vocabulary also organises data, facilitates information retrieval by introducing a semantic layer in social web platform, we plan to implement. The platform could be considered as a « collective memory » which will allow communities to share, co-construct and discover sociocultural knowledge in the Camer...

Journal on Data Semantics, 2016

In this paper, we present a sociocultural platform aiming at persevering and capitalizing sociocultural events in Senegal. This platform relies on Semantic Web technologies. First, we discuss the two ontologies we provided to support our platform: an upper-level sociocultural ontology (USCO) and a human time ontology (HuTO). To build our upper-level ontology we proposed a methodology based on the theory of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky called "Vygotskian Framework". We also present how the upper-level ontology can be matched in the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud. On the other hand, we present the Human Time Ontology (HuTO) of which major contributions are (i) the modeling of non-convex intervals (repetitive interval) like every Monday, (ii) representation deictic temporal expressions which form specific relations with time speech and (iii) qualitative temporal notions which are temporal notions relative to a culture or a geographical position. Finally, we discuss the platform designed on top of Semantic MediaWiki to apply our scientific contributions. indeed, the platform allows Senegalese communities to share and co-construct their sociocultural knowledge.

2015 IEEE International Conference on Information Reuse and Integration, 2015

Ontologies are reusable artifacts within the Software Engineering filed that are a pillar of the Semantic Web. Created in a different context, they can be adapted and applied in another context. This paper endeavors to develop a knowledge base in the form of an ontology that formalizes all aspects to do with culture and thus contribute to the preservation and dissemination of cultural knowledge. Written in the context of a small African country (Botswana), the ontology is expected to be generic enough to be adaptable and reusable in the global context. Culture is the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, defined by everything from language, livelihoods, religion, traditional medicine, cuisine, social habits, music and arts. Culture is transmitted orally from father to son, mother to daughter or teacher to a student. However, this knowledge is gradually lost as many young people migrate to popular culture. The absence of tools and technologies that aide in the preservation and dissemination of cultural knowledge lead to the gradual loss of cultural valuable information that could be useful for tourism, and learning. Information currently representing elements that define culture is dispersed, heterogeneous, disjointed, in varying stages of formalization and digitization, and distributed in collections of different memory organizations at different locations. As a solution, this paper introduces ontologies to formulate an efficient way to preserve and represent cultural knowledge. The benefits of the cultural ontology include; reuse, sharing, and portability of knowledge across platforms. Overall, the cultural knowledge ontology leads to a better understanding of concepts in the cultural domain and to a more effective and efficient way of handling information about concepts in the cultural knowledge domain.

2016

This paper sets out an organizing framework for the field of social ontology, the study of the nature of the social world. The subject matter of social ontology is clarified, in particular the difference between it and the study of causal relations and the explanation of social phenomena. Two different inquiries are defined and explained: the study of the grounding of social facts, and the study of how social categories are " anchored " or set up. The distinction between these inquiries is used to clarify prominent programs in social theory, particularly theories of practice and varieties of individualism.

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applications, such as " Knowledge-Based MarketPlaces" (KBMs), lead to co-construct symbolic organizational artifacts including "maps" or others semantic instruments, bringing a visibility and a reflexivity of the knowledge and of the action in communities. In presenting and comparing examples of KBMs, we note that the creation and the whole lifecycle of such S2W applications mobilize the actors at an epistemic level, but also at socio-organizational and inter-personal levels. A methodology to accompany S2W applications must take in account all these aspects, and we suggest to base it on the Theory of Symbolic Communicational Transactions and Communities of Action (Zacklad 03b).

Participatory democracy advances in virtually all governments. South America presents a prominent context with mixed culture and social predisposition. In 2012, civil, academic and governmental parties started elaborating the "Common Vocabulary of Social Participation" (vcps from the Brazilian name Vocabulário Comum de Participação Social), as a public and online process. By May, 2013, first reference documents were publicized, together with a preliminary owl code, logos, and a diagram of a general "public consultation". The corais platform kept online records of the process, like discussions and preparation of texts. This article exposes this material and proposes an elementary unfolding: the "Social Participation Ontology" (ops from the Brazilian name Ontologia de Participação Social). To exhibit this new ontology, these steps were considered: correction of ontological contradictions and owl protocol use errors; completion of vcps owl code into a preliminary version of the ops; translations and standardizations; enhancements of class names and labels in Portuguese, Spanish and English; a toy expansion of the ontology by further specifying classes; linked data examples regarding dereferencing, a sparql endpoint and participatory instances; use cases by researchers and public managers. Ongoing work involves further adoption of ops by the official Brazilian federal portal of social participation, further adoption by civil participatory organizations, and linkage to other participatory ontologies. ops is being used as an upper ontology, and all classes linked further to foaf and bfo as higher upper ontologies.

Future Internet, 2012

The social trend is progressively becoming the key feature of current Web understanding (Web 2.0). This trend appears irrepressible as millions of users, directly or indirectly connected through social networks, are able to share and exchange any kind of content, information, feeling or experience. Social interactions radically changed the user approach. Furthermore, the socialization of content around social objects provides new unexplored commercial marketplaces and business opportunities. On the other hand, the progressive evolution of the web towards the Semantic Web (or Web 3.0) provides a formal representation of knowledge based on the meaning of data. When the social meets semantics, the social intelligence can be formed in the context of a semantic environment in which user and community profiles as well as any kind of interaction is semantically represented (Semantic Social Web). This paper first provides a conceptual analysis of the second and third version of the Web model. That discussion is aimed at the definition of a middle concept (Web 2.5) resulting in the convergence and integration of key features from the current and next generation Web. The Semantic Social Web (Web 2.5) has a clear theoretical meaning, understood as the bridge between the overused Web 2.0 and the not yet mature Semantic Web (Web 3.0).

knowledge modeling < knowledge engineering < artificial intelligence < computer applications < computer operations < (activities and operations), organization of information < information operations < (activities and operations), classification < organization of information < information operations < (activities and operations) This article presents and validates a cluster-based method for creating cultural ontologies for community-oriented information systems. The introduced semi-automated approach merges distributed annotation techniques, or subjective assessments of similarities between cultural categories, with established clustering methods to produce "cognate" ontologies. This approach is validated against a locally-authentic ethnographic method, involving direct work with communities for the design of "fluid" ontologies. The evaluation is conducted with of a set of Native American communities located in San Diego County (CA, USA). The principal aim of this research is to discover whether distributing the annotation process among isolated respondents would enable ontology hierarchies to be created that are similar to those that are crafted according to collaborative ethnographic processes, found to be effective in generating continuous usage across several studies. Our findings suggest that the proposed semi-automated solution best optimizes between issues of interoperability and scaleability, de-emphasized in the fluid ontology approach, and sustainable usage.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

The value that social web is adding is undeniable. However, social web is coming at a cost: the so-called "closed" web. Slowly but steadily, a growing portion of internet activity is confined within the spaces of social networking sites (SNS) or platforms that encompass social networking capabilities by default. Furthermore, due to their competitive stance between one another, conceptually common content and functionality are accessed through different mechanisms in SNSs. This work deals with the issue of semantic equivalence between the prevalent notions used in SNSs in order to device a common object model that will enable the integration of social platform APIs. The result is the proposal for an ontology for the implementation of cross-platform social applications. Two particular applications are considered as a guide for this reference model.