ROCA: An Ontology to Describe and analyse Tool Use and Tool Making

Abstract

AbstractTo contribute to current discussions on the complexity of extinct and modern non-human and human primate tasks, we explore if ontologies are helpful as a means of representing tool tasks. We thus hope to help illuminate how primates approach tool tasks internally, such as breaking open a nutshell between a wooden anvil and a stone hammer to access its nutritious contents or fishing for termites with a leaf midrib. Ontologies are widely used in domains such as linguistics, medicine, archaeology, and cultural heritage, to help experts organize, reason on, and discover new knowledge in their field. We build a novel ontology, ROCA (from ‘roca’ - - rock, in Spanish) with which we can describe instances of tool use in a formal and uniform manner, including well-known primate ethograms and chaînes opératoires. We will see that representing tool use and tool making with an ontology provides auniform, unified, acentric, dynamic, and human-readable way to handle knowledge obtained from literature and to perform knowledge discovery. We build a representative corpus of 75 articles and books on primate and hominin tool use and tool making. We then extract and give semantic structure such as taxonomical relationships to relevant vocabulary, both manually and automatically, using NLP text mining techniques. We then show how the ontology can be used to discover new knowledge related to tool use and tool making.