The Ontology Explorer: A method to make visible data infrastructures for population management

This article details the methodology of the ‘Ontology Explorer’, a method and a tool to analyse data models underpinning information systems. The Ontology Explorer (OE) is a semantic method and javascript-based open-source tool thought to compare data models collected in different formats and used by diverse systems. It’s distinctive in two respects. First, it supports analyses of information systems which are not immediately comparable. Second, it systematically and quantitatively supports discursive analysis of ‘thin’ data models, also by detecting differences and absences through comparison. Used with data models underpinning systems for population management, the OE allows apprehending how people are ‘inscribed’ in information systems; which assumptions are made about them, which possibilities are excluded by design. The OE thus constitutes a methodology to capture authorities’ own imaginaries of populations, and the ‘scripts’ through which they enact actual people as such. Furthermore, the method allows comparing diverse authorities’ scripts, as this article shows by illustrating its functioning with information systems for population management deployed at the European borders. Our approach integrates a number of insights from early infrastructure studies and extends their methods and analytical depth to account for contemporary data infrastructures. By so doing, we hope to trigger a systematic discussion on how to extend those early methodical innovations at the semantic level to contemporary developments in digital methods.