ROCA – AN ONTOLOGY FOR CAPTURING AND ANALYSING TOOL USE AND TOOL MAKING

To contribute to current discussions on the complexity of extinct and modern non-human and human primate tasks, we explore if ontologies are helpful as a means of representing tool tasks. We thus hope to help illuminate external and internal planning depth of tool tasks, such as breaking open a nutshell between a wooden anvil and a stone hammer to access its nutritious contents or fishing for termites with a leaf midrib. Ontologies are widely used in domains such as linguistics, medicine, archaeology, and cultural heritage, to help experts organize, reason on, and discover new knowledge in their field. We build a novel ontology, ROCA (Robotics, COgnition, and Archaeology) with which we can describe instances of tool use in a formal and uniform manner, including well-known primate ethograms, chaînes opératoires, and Petri nets. We will see that representing tool use and tool making with an ontology provides a uniform, unified, acentric, dynamic, and human-readable way to handle knowledge obtained from literature and to perform knowledge discovery . We build a representative corpus of articles and books on primate and hominin tool use and tool making. We then extract and give semantic structure such as taxonomical relationships to relevant vocabulary, both manually and automatically, using NLP text mining techniques. We then show how the ontology can be used to discover new knowledge related to tool use and tool making. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.