A Foundry of Human Activities and Infrastructures

TL;DR

This paper proposes a realist semantic modeling approach for representing human activities and infrastructures in knowledgebases, aiming to improve digital libraries with integrated, ontology-based representations of routines, social interactions, and explanations.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive framework for modeling everyday activities and infrastructures using a collection of ontologies and explores methods for developing and validating explanations of entity relationships.

Findings

Developed a model for routine human activities and technologies.

Analyzed interactions between technologies and social organization.

Outlined approaches for validating explanations of entity relationships.

Abstract

Direct representation knowledgebases can enhance and even provide an alternative to document-centered digital libraries. Here we consider realist semantic modeling of everyday activities and infrastructures in such knowledgebases. Because we want to integrate a wide variety of topics, a collection of ontologies (a foundry) and a range of other knowledge resources are needed. We first consider modeling the routine procedures that support human activities and technologies. Next, we examine the interactions of technologies with aspects of social organization. Then, we consider approaches and issues for developing and validating explanations of the relationships among various entities.