Adventures of Categories: Modelling the Evolution of Categories During Scientific Investigation

Categories are the fundamental components of scientific knowledge and are used in every phase of the scientific process. However, they are often in a state of flux, with new observations, discoveries and changes in our conceptual understanding leading to the birth and death of categories, drift in their identities, as well as merging or splitting. Contemporary research tools rarely support such changes in operationalized categories, neglecting the problem of capturing and utilizing the knowledge lurking behind the process of change. This paper presents a tool -- AdvoCate1 -- that represents the dynamic nature of categories. It allows category evolution to be modelled, while maintaining a category versioning system that captures all the different versions of a category, along with the process of its exploration and evolution through use. This helps us to better understand and communicate different versions of categories and the reasons and decisions behind any changes they undergo. We demonstrate the usefulness of AdvoCate using examples of category evolution from a land cover mapping exercise.