Living ontology
From semanticweb.org
The living ontology is an effort to discipline natural language expressions, especially in page names, to clearly state relations between the described objects.
In practice, LO was and is used to elaborate political and governmental problems and decisions at lp.greenparty.ca open politics, uk.openingpolitics.org, Imagine Halifax and other projects. Some of its base distinctions, especially for political framing, are used in framing political issues at dkosopedia.com.
The LO patterns are CC-by-nc-sa by ECG, the Efficient Civics Guild, while most documentation is CC-by-sa. Descriptions of living ontology (LO):
- compared to, and constrasted with, other similar projects
- described in detail in theoretical context of political science
- described in terms of Better URI Axioms
- Efficient Politics, setting LO's goals
- list of patterns and challenges
- sociosemantic web theory - political
- sociosemantic web theory - technical
- Living Platform in Practice
- excerpted analysis of meaning of "on message"
Its most influential artifact is the issue/position/argument pattern. Unlike other ontologies, LO relies almost exclusively on an extensive set of naming conventions that cover almost every aspect of wiki use, including even page name prefixes and the edit summary tags used to describe edits. Most controlled are prepositions. LO shuns formal expressions of relations, preferring to infer them. It limits bad inference by carefully separating reference and deference distinctions.
LO terms are constrasted to other usage in the Semantic Web Vocabulary. A design feature of LO is its deliberate overloading of natural language meta-terms, its strict adherence to verb/noun/type theory as per REST, the assumption of basic systems theory of leverage and their application in politics, literate programming, and language-oriented programming principles. For instance, the only attributes that a datatype can have are verbs, which incidentally implements the REST principles and object-oriented encapsulation requirements. All topics or pages are treated as nouns, and distinctions are made between proper/Specific and generic/abstract nouns. Domains are treated under the political assumptions as factions, each of which has a specific capacity to control discourse. The ontology is designed to support democratic domains, operating under rules called open politics in force, in which the DNS-style domains would merge. See the real web 3.0 for more technical details of the assumptions living ontology makes.
