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Information Integration in e-Social Science
To facilitate mixed-method approaches in the e-social science context it is necessary to support integration of qualitative and quantitative resources, including simulations. We are investigating the use of a hybrid approach to information integration based on use of both ontologies and folksonomies; a folksonomy is a community-driven method for assignment of string labels (tags) in order to categorise resources. Such a tagging system can be contrasted with an ontology in that the authors of the labeling system are often the main users (and sometimes originators) of the content to which the tags are applied. The decision to explore a hybrid ontology-folksonomy approach was motivated (in part) by feedback from a range of social scientists who expressed disquiet over an entirely ontology driven mechanism. Qualitative analysis within social science typically involves labeling a text document (e.g. interview transcript) with a series of "codes"; we are developing a qualitative analysis tool called Squanto which supports labeling with both free text labels and codes selected from an ontology. In addition, the tool allows a user to create relationships between codes taken from the ontology and those from the unstructured tag space; these relationships facilitate retrieval of related resources from local and Grid repositories.