Texts, compositions, and works: A socio-cultural perspective on information entities

The increasing adoption of computer technologies in the human sciences brought out the need for the ontological modeling of literary works (simply works). Despite the debate, the nature of works remains challenging. Applied ontologists, especially when dealing with foundational topics, have been using the notion of information artifact for capturing multiple dimensions of linguistic expressions, among other things. Surprisingly, the communities analyzing works and information artifacts have only marginally interacted. By assuming an interdisciplinary stance, we look at works by relying on theories coming from philology, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. The core idea is to consider works as socio-cultural entities emerging from social processes of meaning negotiation. This brings us to discuss the notions of text and composition, as well as to look at interpretation and collective agreement processes. By the end of the paper, we will see how our results can shed some light on information artifacts, too.