A while ago, I was asked to contribute to a forthcoming Encyclopaedia of Sound Studies. The contracts have been signed so the entry on Computer Science and Sound is being written.
One of the things that I have been playing around with is creating a Linked Data graph of programming languages, what facets exists, and what their relationships are present. I made a small ontology that focusses on creating the possibility of sound. I will come back to the ontology later, but I quickly sketched it out on some paper and drew the relationships as a starter.
I then spent time going through machine specific programming manuals for BASIC on the BBC, Commodore, Spectrum, and a couple of Acorn machines. This is there to allow me to see how the same language is represented on different machines. As a testing process, it enabled me to see relationships between facets that were not immediately obvious and to refine the ontology. I can see one that I missed is a hardware relationship between machine and sound synthesis card as I write this.
I should also describe the ontology (DHI, Protege) as well in varying ways and expect that it will change. The process is not the most exciting, but it will lift out some tacit knowledge and assumptions and allow a critical reflection on what is modelled and how. While the later representation forms can be critical, they are affected by the underlying model. One aspect that will happen is subclassing from FOAF as some entities have names.
So my next step is to put this into a tool to use SPARQL to explore it and to make sketches of what might by useful. Here I need to be mindful that I could throw parts out again.
[…] few posts ago, I wrote about sketching out some ideas for an ontology to work through programming languages and their interaction with […]