New Publication: “The ontology explorer: A method to make visible data infrastructures for population management””

In a new article, Wouter Van Rossem and Annalisa Pelizza introduce a method and open-source tool to analyse data models of population management systems.

The article is titled “The ontology explorer: A method to make visible data infrastructures for population management” and published Open Access in the journal Big Data & Society.

The Ontology Explorer (OE) has been developed by the Wouter and Annalisa, who recognised a need to compare data models collected in different formats and used by diverse systems.

In the article they illustrate the of the method to data models of information systems for population management deployed at the European border.

In this way, the method makes it possible to see how people are “inscribed” in information systems: which assumptions are made about them, and which possibilities are excluded by design.

With this article, Wouter and Annalisa hope to trigger a discussion on how to extend the early methodical innovations from early infrastructure and classification studies, to contemporary developments in digital methods.

The tool can be freely used on the website Processing Citizenship. The source code is available on Github.