Operationalizing Scholarly Observations in OWL

There is increasing attention in the Digital Humanities for information systems to document and analyze scholarly debates, a case for all being that of criticism in literature or performing arts. To make these systems available, there is a call for formal models to represent alternative perspectives about the same entity (text, music composition, artwork, etc.), even when they do not perfectly align or are explicitly incompatible. Building on previous research, we propose the core module for an ontology to model scholarly perspectives as observations. To enable tasks such as data classification, sharing, and reasoning, the ontology takes the advantages of formal languages such as OWL and SWRL. The ontology is developed with a modular architecture, where the presented module is the most general one for reuse across different domains. We also present a case study in literary studies to exemplify the ontology and show its potential usage.