Ontological Modeling of Scholarly Statements: A Case Study in Literary Criticism

In many application domains, it is common to talk not only about the entities populating that domain, but also about statements (aka claims) that are expressed about those very entities. This is particularly the case in the Humanities, e.g., when scholars express their critical statements about paintings, literary texts, musical works, etc. The ontological modeling of such claims is challenging for various reasons, e.g., because one needs to capture their subjective but also public dimension, because scholars may express contrasting statements about the same phenomena, or because the argumentative logic of scholarly reasoning does not squarely fit into the methods of mathematical logic. Building on previous work on the treatment of observations and being driven by concrete case studies, we propose the first steps for an ontology to document scholarly statements and to trace critical debates in literary studies.