The aim of the following report is to outline the content of the lectures given during the First IAOA Interdisciplinary Summer School on Ontological Analysis (July 16-20, 2012, Trento, Italy). The report emphasizes some of the hot topics or open questions discussed during the sessions, while reflecting a variety of perspectives on the goals of ontological analysis and the importance of interdisciplinarity in dealing with certain problems.

We report on the experience of creating a socially networked system, the Research-oriented Social Environment (RoSE), for representing knowledge in the form of relationships between people, documents, and groups. Developed as an intercampus, interdisciplinary project of the University of California, this work reflects on a collaboration between scholars in the humanities, software engineering, and information studies by providing an opportunity not only to synthesize different disciplinary perspectives, but also to interrogate and challenge the assumptions each brings to team-based design projects in the digital humanities. This work examines socially networked knowledge as both content and methodology for collaboration, calling for further critique and future investigation of epistemological questions in models of social networks.