The importance of culture in digital ecosystems

Abstract

The increasing emphasis on research data curation is raising new challenges for curators and the systems they employ to create sustainable data archives that will respond to the evolving research environment. The skills developed in a long history of managing 'monocultural' quantitative datasets must now be extended to the broader requirements entailed in the management of complex digital ecosystems whose elements range from structured qualitative datasets to collections of research materials in multifarious formats. As in natural ecosystems, all are highly contextualized and often extremely sensitive in regard to storage, access and potential reuse. The protocols that codify those requirements must be formulated carefully and translated into systems management effectively. The curation of research data relating to Indigenous peoples starkly illustrates these challenges by presenting major cultural and ontological complexities. It suggests approaches for handling research data in other sensitive domains.

Two Ontological Approaches to Building an Intergrated Semantic Network for Yami ka-Verbs

“…Some studies on indigenous cultures regarded the metaphors of the indigenous culture as parts of the ecological system [1]. In the next section, we will show how to use the ecological system in Yami culture as a starting point to establish our verbal classification system.…”

“…It is a very challenging task to collect a comprehensive corpus for the endangered language, as the scarce resources and lack of archives present a problem in establishing a sizable corpus. Therefore, many organizations, such as SIL, DOBES and UNESCO, have sponsored projects to help researchers carry out endangered language documentation [1]. However, few research teams have focused on studying the semantics of these languages.…”

A Proposed Model for Constructing a Yami WordNet

“…It is a very challenging task to collect a comprehensive corpus for the endangered language, as the scarce resources and lack of archives present a big problem in establishing a sizable corpus. However, many organizations, such as SIL, Dobes and UNESCO, have sponsored projects to help researchers carry out endangered language documentation [1] Having collected a substantial number of Yami texts for our corpus, we have produced an online dictionary and created an ontology of fish [11] [12].…”