Ontologies: A Wish List for the Humanities

In this paper, we analyze the problems the Humanities currently face and discuss how ontologies could help them - provided the ontology toolkits had support for additional capabilities. We enumerate these capabilities and describe their necessity for research in the Humanities. Keywords: logical contexts, ontologies, argumentation, test corpora, CYC. The Humanities are a late-comer to the ontology game. As much as we are encouraged by signs of growing interest, we will argue that it is essential for the Humanities to leverage fully the research possibilities that ontologies offer. We will justify this claim through an analysis of the problems that the Humanities currently face. However, as a result of the community's delayed involvement, we perceive the playing field to be shaped by the needs of the early adopters. The capabilities of the ontology toolkits currently available are dominated by the needs of the Natural Sciences - esp. the medical1 and the pharmaceutical disciplines - and the Engineering Sciences. We propose that the different research needs of the Humanities emphasize different capabilities and identify five areas of modeling capability that the Humanities need: ontological plurality, contexts, argumentation systems, question corpora management systems and representational expressivity. These capabilities together form a wish list addressed to the ontology toolkit development community. We conclude by showing that the Humanities have allies in requesting these features and make preliminary suggestions for the order in which the features should be pursued.