That department of the science of metaphysics which investigates and explains the nature and essential properties and relations of all beings, as such, or the principles and causes of being
Ontologies resemble faceted taxonomies but use richer semantic relationships among terms and attributes, as well as strict rules about how to specify terms and relationships Because ontologies do more than just control a vocabulary, they are thought of as knowledge representation The oft-quoted definition of ontology is "the specification of one's conceptualization of a knowledge domain "
The creation of a systematically ordered data structure that enhances exchange of information between computers and scientists Ontologies enable the definition and sharing of domain-specific vocabularies
One of the major branches of philosophy, most often contrasted with epistemology Essentially, ontology is the study of what actually is For most people, for most purposes, ontology ultimately comes down to physics
A Yahoo-like hierarchy of relationships and a glossary used as a standardization device to describe goods and services and to facilitate commerce in a Net market (See normalize )
A partial specification of a conceptual vocabulary to be used for formulating knowledge-level theories about a domain of discourse The fundamental role of an ontology is to support knowledge sharing and reuse
An explicit formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts, and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them
1 The fundamental categories of what sorts or kinds of things there are in the universe At one level of analysis, tables and chairs might be considered to be distinct kinds of things; but for the purposes of ontology, tables and chairs are (usually regarded as being) the same sort of 'thing', namely physical (or spatiotemporal) entities Other 'fundamental' sorts of things which have been proposed by various philosophers at one time or another have been: sets (or classes), propositions, facts, states of affairs, universals, numbers, causal connections, forces, substances, souls, minds, spiritual beings, ethical values, purposes, etc
In philosophy, ontology is the study of being In knowledge-based systems, an ontology is that part of the system which specifies what things exist and what is true about them Cyc's ontology is essentially its whole knowledge base You may hear people refer to their "ontology of devices" or their "temporal ontology" What they are talking about is those parts of their knowledge base (the constants and assertions) that concern devices or time
"Ontologies are being developed as specific concept models by the Knowledge Management community They can represent complex relationships between objects, and include the rules and axioms missing from semantic networks Ontologies that describe knowledge in a specific area are often connected with systems for data mining and knowledge management" "NKOS Taxonomy of Knowledge Organization Sources/Systems" Draft, July 31, 2000 Online Available at http: //nkos slis kent edu/KOS_taxonomy htm
Branch of philosophy concerned with the study of the nature of being An ontology can be thought of as a description of the nature of some aspect of being or being in general
Metaphysics is customarily divided into ontology, which deals with the question of how many fundamentally distinct sorts of entities compose the universe, and metaphysics proper, which is concerned with describing the most general traits of reality
Ontology is the study of being, and it encompasses everything involved with the beings within humans, the process of becoming our beings fully, and relationships between degrees of being and the ontological worlds they create Ontological refers to anything that has to do with the realself For example, ontologically sensitive people are sensitive to the realselves within themselves and within others See also Realself ontology
Ontology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of existence. + ontological on·to·logi·cal the ontological question of the relationship between mind and body. a subject of study in philosophy that is concerned with the nature of existence (ontologia, from ont- , from einai ). Theory of being as such. It was originally called "first philosophy" by Aristotle. In the 18th century Christian Wolff contrasted ontology, or general metaphysics, with special metaphysical theories of souls, bodies, or God, claiming that ontology could be a deductive discipline revealing the essences of things. This view was later strongly criticized by David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Ontology was revived in the early 20th century by practitioners of phenomenology and existentialism, notably Edmund Husserl and his student Martin Heidegger. In the English-speaking world, interest in ontology was renewed in the mid-20th century by W.V.O. Quine; by the end of the century it had become a central discipline of analytic philosophy. See also idealism; realism; universal
A model of a particular field of knowledge - the concepts and their attributes, as well as the relationships between the concepts In Protégé/Win, an ontology is represented as a set of classes with their associated slots
Ontology is the study of what there is, an inventory of what exists An ontological commitment is a commitment to an existence claim <Discussion> <References> Gene Witmer
The hierarchical structuring of knowledge about things by subcategorising them according to their essential (or at least relevant and/or cognitive) qualities This is an extension of the previous senses of "ontology" which has become common in discussions about the difficulty of maintaining subject indices
An ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization 'Conceptualization' refers to an abstract model of phenomena in the world by having identified the relevant concepts of those phenomena 'Explicit' means that the type of concepts used, and the constraints on their use are explicitly defined 'Formal' refers to the fact that the ontology should be machine readable 'Shared' reflects that ontology should capture consensual knowledge accepted by the communities [source]
an explicit formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them The <indecs> framework produced such an ontology, which has been further developed and forms the basis of the (DOI) TermSet