The Ethics of Vocabulary Development and Use

The ethics of vocabulary development and use, and similar knowledge organization systems (or semantic artifacts) is introduced. It is a seldom-discussed or explored topic, but it's relevance to contemporary computational research and data sciences is made clear, the motivating case being a more complex semantic artefact (namely ontologies). Broadly construed, this project includes the ethics of metadata, of semantics, of ontology, and similar artifacts. The ongoing project aims to complete and propose a set of principles for the ethics of these systems, as well as explore and identify the potential or actual ethical and moral implications of various aspects of these artifacts. Concerns and topics from the ethics of artificial intelligence and digital ethics are relevant and inform this research and development activity, such as privacy, bias, data- sharing, machine ethics, and so on. The project and author are actively open to formal support to sustainably pursue this promising line of research. Interested parties are encouraged to make contact.

References
1. Rovetto, R.J. The ethics of conceptual, ontological, semantic and knowledge modeling. AI & Soc (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01563-3
2. Rovetto, R.J., "Ethics of Semantics" in US2TS 2022
3. "The Ethics of Ontology", poster presented at OntoCommons 2nd Global Workshop (June 2023).
4. Rovetto, R.J., "Ethics in Ontology", (2013-present), Abstract via PhilPapers.
5. Ethics of Ontology GitHub page, http://purl.org/rrovetto/ethics-of-ontology

Version note

Addition of presentation slides