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From Ontology to Structured Applied Epistemology

Developing and organizing new knowledge is a core activity for scholars. Recently, ontologies have been introduced as an approach for organizing knowledge. However, most ontologies do not readily support the development and organization of new knowledge. By comparison, to ontology, epistemology is the study of what can be known. Aspects of epistemology include the acquisition of and justification for new knowledge. Thus, we need to coordinate ontology with epistemology. Because we are developing frameworks for capturing knowledge across several scholarly domains, we describe the work in this paper as exploring structured applied epistemology. Unlike other recent proposals for new approaches to scholarly publishing, we propose an integrated and comprehensive approach. We have explored direct representation based on the rigorous Basic Formal Ontology and in this paper, we consider how epistemology can be incorporated with that. In addition to highly-structured scientific research reports, we also consider how to develop highly-structured descriptions of historical events on which historical analyses can be based.