Ontology From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In philosophy, ontology (from the Greek oν, genitive oντος: of being (part. of εiναι: to be) and –λογία: science, study, theory) is the study of being or existence. It seeks to describe or posit the basic categories and relationships of being or existence to define entities and types of entities within its framework. Ontology can be said to study conceptions of reality. Some philosophers, notably of the Platonic school, contend that all nouns refer to entities. Other philosophers contend that some nouns do not name entities but provide a kind of shorthand way of referring to a collection (of either objects or events). In this latter view, mind, instead of referring to an entity, refers to a collection of mental events experienced by a person; society refers to a collection of persons with some shared characteristics, and geometry refers to a collection of a specific kind of intellectual activity. Any ontology must give an account of which words refer to entities, which do not, why, and what categories result. When one applies this process to nouns such as electrons, energy, contract, happiness, time, truth, causality, and God, ontology becomes fundamental to many branches of philosophy.

Philosophical Ontology Ontology as a branch of philosophy is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality. ‘Ontology’ is often used by philosophers as a synonym of ‘metaphysics’ (a label meaning literally: ‘what comes after the Physics’), a term used by early students of Aristotle to refer to what Aristotle himself called ‘first philosophy’. Sometimes ‘ontology’ is used in a broader sense, to refer to the study of what might exist; ‘metaphysics’ is then used for the study of which of the various alternative possible ontologies is in fact true of reality. (Ingarden 1964) The term ‘ontology’ (or ontologia) was coined in 1613, independently, by two philosophers, Rudolf Göckel (Goclenius), in his Lexicon philosophicum and Jacob Lorhard (Lorhardus), in his Theatrum philosophicum. Its first occurrence in English as recorded by the OED appears in Bailey’s dictionary of 1721, which defines ontology as ‘an Account of being in the Abstract’. Barry Smith. Preprint version of chapter “Ontology”, in L. Floridi (ed.), Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, 155–166.

Ontology and Information Science In a related development, also hardly noticed by philosophers, the term ‘ontology’ has gained currency in recent years in the field of computer and information science. […] [T]he term ‘ontology’ came to be used by information scientists to describe the construction of a canonical description of this sort. An ontology is in this context a dictionary of terms formulated in a canonical syntax and with commonly accepted definitions designed to yield a lexical or taxonomical framework for knowledge- representation which can be shared by different information systems communities. More ambitiously, an ontology is a formal theory within which not only definitions but also a supporting framework of axioms is included (perhaps the axioms themselves provide implicit definitions of the terms involved). Barry Smith. Preprint version of chapter “Ontology”, in L. Floridi (ed.), Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Computing and Information, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, 155–166.

Ontology (computer science) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia In both computer science and information science, an ontology is a data model that represents a domain and is used to reason about the objects in that domain and the relations between them. Ontologies are used in artificial intelligence, the semantic web, software engineering and information architecture as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it. Ontologies generally describe: Individuals: the basic or "ground level" objects Classes: sets, collections, or types of objects Attributes: properties, features, characteristics, or parameters that objects can have and share Relations: ways that objects can be related to one another

According to Tom Gruber at Stanford University, the meaning of ontology in the context of computer science, however, is “a description of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents.” He goes on to specify that an ontology is generally written, “as a set of definitions of formal vocabulary.”

The subject of ontology is the study of the categories of things that exist or may exist in some domain. The product of such a study, called an ontology, is a catalog of the types of things that are assumed to exist in a domain of interest D from the perspective of a person who uses a language L for the purpose of talking about D. The types in the ontology represent the predicates, word senses, or concept and relation types of the language L when used to discuss topics in the domain D. An uninterpreted logic, such as predicate calculus, conceptual graphs, or KIF, is ontologically neutral. It imposes no constraints on the subject matter or the way the subject may be characterized. By itself, logic says nothing about anything, but the combination of logic with an ontology provides a language that can express relationships about the entities in the domain of interest.

An informal ontology may be specified by a catalog of types that are either undefined or defined only by statements in a natural language. A formal ontology is specified by a collection of names for concept and relation types organized in a partial ordering by the type-subtype relation. Formal ontologies are further distinguished by the way the subtypes are distinguished from their supertypes: an axiomatized ontology distinguishes subtypes by axioms and definitions stated in a formal language, such as logic or some computer-oriented notation that can be translated to logic; a prototype-based ontology distinguishes subtypes by a comparison with a typical member or prototype for each subtype. Large ontologies often use a mixture of definitional methods: formal axioms and definitions are used for the terms in mathematics, physics, and engineering; and prototypes are used for plants, animals, and common household items.