Ontologies and Technologies: Knowledge Representation or Misrepresentation

O'Hara, Dr Kieron (2004) Ontologies and Technologies: Knowledge Representation or Misrepresentation. SIGIR 04, Semantic Web Workshop SIGIR Forum 38(2), Sheffield.

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The development of the Semantic Web (SW) raises a number of difficult and interesting technical issues. Less often remarked, however, are the social and political debates that it will engender, if and when the technologies become widely accepted. As the SW is a technology for transferring information and knowledge efficiently and effectively, then many of these questions have an epistemological base. In this paper I want to focus especially on the epistemological underpinnings of these social issues, to think about the interaction between the epistemological and the political. How does technology affect the social networks in which it is embedded? How can technology be successfully transplanted into a new context? And, perhaps most importantly for us, how is technology affected by its context? In particular, I want to look at how our decisions about how we treat knowledge can impact quite dramatically on the technologies we produce.

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