Vocabulary or Ontology ?

I was wondering what the difference between an ontology, thesuari and a vocabulary within the parameters of LOD might be:

A vocabulary is a set of terms (words, codes, etc.) that are used in a specific community. Vocabularies provide a mechanism for communication- be it written, oral or electronic- because the meaning of the terms are known and agreed upon by the community members.

 An ontology is a representation of knowledge, generally of a particular domain, written with a standardized, structured syntax that describes the relationship between concepts, also called resources, that serve to characterize the domain.

Thesauri are similar to ontologies in that they can describe hierarchical and associative relationships between terms. However, they are generally used to facilitate indexing and retrieval of written and recorded items. (source)


Which got me thinking whilst I was in the pub waiting for a friend:

Might be interesting to build an app which just displayed the 'description data' for different concepts and ideas, for example public art, community art etc. This ties in with the idea of publishing the outcome of my PHD, the speculations, as LOD data, via a carefully crafted ontology.

Overall i may also be an idea to published an ontology that lists all the modifications to a particular term, for example community art, each update would be listed and would feature a disjoint with the previous version. So Kwon's  definition would relate to previous definitions, other classes  would also be defined such as collaborator, participant, public. Each would feature a revision history. There might also be a description of methods and properties.

This process of building an vocabulary has also presented the idea of producing a vocabulary for single concepts, for example 'happiness' 'ecstasy' 'epiphany' and listing existing and invited descriptions. It would be easy to build these using something like protege and using ontology search engines such as Swoggle.

Which leads onto the thought of data modelling as a kind of creative practice. And the possibility that data modelling should not conform to some inherent 'logic' rather that it might not be constrained in this way, and the production of vocabularies and ontologies might allow some other  subjectivities to come to influence production. In this way the passage from data to information and onto knowledge maybe rendered across a range of forms, rather than just that indicated by formal data models, for data modeling is if nothing else, spatial; i fact I cannot believe there have not been examples of artists and theorists design ontologies and vocabularies, perhaps there are and i haven't found them.

Ontology Up

Finally the first version of my 'cultural projects' ontology is live:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16463134/LOD/cultural-project.rdf

I've used the ontology to describe Landscape-portrait using this rdf file:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16463134/LOD/lp-rbl.rdf

the participants:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16463134/LOD/participant.rdf

and the videos the participants created:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/16463134/LOD/video_1.rdf

So far I have only included one participant and one set of videos, but I'll update this over the next weeks to include a selection of participants from Bournemouth. Within the ontology as well as a 'participant' class or concept there is also class's of collaborators, which are defined differently to participants, or to use LOD semantic are a disjoint with 'participant', that is one person cannot be both. I'll add the collaborators over the next few weeks.

It was really important that the concepts or classes tally with the written research, so we have a class 'project' of which 'Community_Art_Project' is a subclass, and each project has a property of 'hasResource' and participant and collaborator class has the property of 'IsParticipantIn' and 'IsCollaboratorIn' respectively.

In terms of tools I have been using Protege which was recommended by Richard Light, who has been a massive help in guiding me in this work. Also been using http://swoogle.umbc.edu/
to locate existing ontologies.

RDF linked Data

Just working my way through some RDF DBpedia tutorials and there is the start of some form of structure where by the video data from Landscape-Portrait might be published into the public realm. For example if postcodes are objects within DBpedia, then the video content of LP could be assigned to that name. Then when other users make use of that postcode name, they will be able to access the video content from LP along with descriptive elements such as what was the question being answered etc. Need to draw this out to make sense of it, and maybe run a query of the postcode and see what information is already assisgned to it.

Semantic, RDF and Linked data.

Just writing a description of the final phase of the Landscape-Portrait Bournemouth project. In reading about the history of RDF as a subset of XML it seems to me, materially and maybe structurally, that there is a connection between the schema of RDF and the materiality of video. 

For example the portrait videos in Landscape-Portrait do not work in a statistical fashion, rather each video text is a temporal descriptor, rather than an abstract fixed piece of data. In order to access it a coherent taxonomy, such as that outlined by RDF needs to be employed. 

In essence the video functions as a container, much in the same way as XML/RDF is a  language for describing content in a uniform manner, video is used as a temporal container of descriptive information, which might be accessed by RDF protocols and made sense of at a machinic level by using a semantic approach. 

That said the video is also a signifier of a great deal of other information not quantifiable using a descriptive language such as RDF such as might be understood by Jameson's description of video as ‘a total flow’ of imagery, words, context. Overiding the hegemony of the linguistic medium' and perhaps this quote form Jameson points towards this machinic understanding: 

'“Yet the involvement of the machine in all this allows us now perhaps to escape phenomenology and the rhetoric of consciousness and experience, and to confront the seemingly subjective temporality in a new and materialist way, a way which constitutes a new kind of materialism as well, one not of matter but of machinery.' (Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism, 1991).