Customized implementation of VIVO for working with philosophical texts

Georgy Litvinov

Keywords: vivo, philosophical texts, complex logical search

TL;DR: VIVO as a platform for research in humanities

Abstract:

Institute of philosophy Russian Academy of Sciences is working on Electronic Philosophical Encyclopedia. VIVO was chosen as a research information system and platform for representing Encyclopedia articles. To present Electronic Philosophical Encyclopedia articles in VIVO we created “text structures” ontology. It presents encyclopedic philosophical articles in a form of excerpt trees. In future other types of publications planned to be presented the same way.
This project assumes creation of compilations from excerpts as new views on subjects. To facilitate creation of new compilations search functionality has been enriched with an enhanced logical search form that allows the use of predefined SPARQL queries results in search queries. These enhancements in combination with VIVO's wide capabilities for displaying search results, made it possible to compose virtual compilations from search results and save them by authenticated users.
In order to split articles created in ordinary text editors into excerpts and load into VIVO, we created a converter from LibreOffice Writer documents to RDF format that uses “texts structures” ontology.
To annotate excerpts of philosophical texts, the development of philosophical relations ontology was started. This ontology, together with philosophical rubricator, is used to assign rubrics to excerpts. Work is underway to extend this ontology with new relations that should fully reflect real relationships between philosophical texts like the logical, paradigmatic, mereological etc.