A dynamic ontology for a dynamic reference work
Mathias Niepert, Cameron J. Buckner, Colin Allen · 2007
The successful deployment of digital technologies by humanities scholars presents computer scientists with a number of unique scientific and technological challenges. The task seems particularly daunting because issues in the humanities are presented in abstract language demanding the kind of subtle interpretation often thought to be beyond the scope of artificial intelligence, and humanities scholars themselves often disagree about the structure of their disciplines. The future of humanities computing depends on having tools for automatically discovering complex semantic relationships among different parts of a corpus. Digital library tools for the humanities will need to be capable of dynamically tracking the introduction of new ideas and interpretations and applying them to older texts in ways that support the needs of scholars and students.