Knowledge is one of humanity’s highest achievements. But the formal representation of cultural and in particular philosophical knowledge still poses great difficulties to information science due to the inherently complex, contextual, indeterminate and contested nature of these disciplines’concepts and knowledge statements. Moreover, while we are seeing rapid technological development and the adoption of machine learning and semantic technologies in all sectors of society, philosophy has not yet risen to the challenge of properly relating to and adequately integrating them. This paper has two aims: First, it argues that we need a potent response to precisely this double challenge and to tackle it from a cross-disciplinary perspective involving philosophy, computational ontology, knowledge graphs, linguistics, lexicology, disagreement research and argumentation theory. Second, the paper also outlines a research agenda for finally opening up and making philosophy’s multiperspectival knowledge contents available to the strongest models of formal knowledge representation: computational ontologies. Our aim is to achieve this, however, without compromising on the computational strengths of ontology nor imposing false stability and consistency on the knowledge base itself.
