This project is a reintroduction of an illustration used by Bruno Latour in the essay “Technology is Society Made Durable,” of a hotel manager who creates programs to increase customer compliance in returning their room keys. Verbal reminder, signage, and a weighted key fob are non-human actants that relate to customers such that customers either return keys (i.e., follow the program) or fail to return keys (i.e. follow the anti-program). The illustration seeks to demonstrate that “if we display a socio-technical network – defining trajectories by actants’ association and substitution, defining actants by all the trajectories in which they enter, by following translations and, finally, by varying the observer’s point of view – we have no need to look for any additional causes. The explanation emerges once the description is saturated.”[^1] Latour’s network description is not grounded in an ontology, and we propose to create a small ontology using the open specifications of RDF, OWL, and SKOS in order to model it. The point of this project is to provide a robust, usable, and versatile framework for doing actor-network analysis, and to champion an approach to non-human actants characteristic of ANT (Actor-Network Theory) as also helpful for understanding systems. The interaction between knowledge organization and ANT has been limited, but should be explored further. ANT operates under certain implied ontological commitments concerning common properties of human and non-human entities as actants, and of relationships as formative of actant identities. The use of actor-network theory can also contribute to organization of programs and anti-programs of human interaction with technologies of surveillance, access, documentation, and communication. These problems currently stand at the forefront of knowledge organization. In our project we will explore an ontology model for Latour’s Hotel Keys and briefly discuss the lessons that this simple actor-network model provides for knowledge organization.
[^1] Latour, B. (1990). Technology is society made durable. The Sociological Review, 38(1_suppl): 103–31, 129.