Soft ontologies, spatial representations and multi-perspective explorability

It is against the dynamically evolving nature of many contemporary media applications to be analysed in terms of conventional rigid ontologies that rely on expertise-based fixed categories and hierarchical structure. Many of these rely on sharing ‘folksonomies’, personal descriptions of information and objects for one’s own retrieval. Such applications involve many feedback mechanisms via the community, and have been shown to have emergent properties of complex dynamic systems. We propose that such dynamically evolving information domains can be more usefully described by means of a soft ontology, a dynamically flexible and inherently spatial metadata approach for ill-defined domains. Our contribution is (1) the elaboration of the so far intuitive concept of soft ontology in a way that supports conceptualizing dynamically evolving domains. Further, our approach proposes (2) a whole new mode of interaction with information domains by means of recurring exploration of an information domain from multiple perspectives in search of more comprehensive understanding of it, i.e. multi-perspective exploration. We demonstrate this concept with an example of collaborative tagging in an educational context.