Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun The theory of being; that branch of metaphysics which investigates the nature of being and of the essence of things, both substances and accidents.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun 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.
- noun (Computers) A systematic arrangement of all of the important categories of objects or concepts which exist in some field of discourse, showing the relations between them. When complete, an
ontology is a categorization of all of the concepts in some field of knowledge, including the objects and all of the properties, relations, and functions needed to define the objects and specify their actions. A simplified ontology may contain only a hierarchical classification (ataxonomy ) showing the type subsumption relations between concepts in the field of discourse. Anontology may be visualized as an abstract graph with nodes and labeled arcs representing the objects and relations.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun uncountable, philosophy The branch of
metaphysics that addresses the nature or essential characteristics ofbeing and of things thatexist ; the study of beingqua being. - noun countable, philosophy The
theory of a particular philosopher or school of thought concerning the fundamental types ofentity in theuniverse . - noun logic A
logical system involving theory of classes, developed by Stanislaw Lesniewski (1886-1939). - noun computer science, information science A
structure of concepts or entities within adomain , organized byrelationships ; a system model.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun (computer science) a rigorous and exhaustive organization of some knowledge domain that is usually hierarchical and contains all the relevant entities and their relations
- noun the metaphysical study of the nature of being and existence
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word ontology.
Examples
-
Often, the term ontology is used to cover both ABox and TBox statements (which, I argue, only makes the understanding of the 'ontology' concept more difficult).
-
So, what does all of this have to do with my starting diatribe about the term ontology?
-
The term "metaphysics" (q.v.) was given a wider extension by Wolff, who divided "real philosophy" into general metaphysics, which he called ontology, and special, under which he included cosmology, psychology, and theodicy.
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 11: New Mexico-Philip 1840-1916 1913
-
And in this paradigm, he argues that the ontology is one of nominalism, programs do not exist in the abstract but only in the concrete.
Three Paradigms of Research in Computer Science « Beki's Blog (there's an original name) 2009
-
Without tracing the history of the notion of rights, or exploring their uncertain ontology, let me simply note here that the current concept arises from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Archive 2009-01-01 2009
-
This paper discusses the development of a new information representation system embodied in ontology and the Semantic Web.
Research Paper: Ontology and the Semantic Web « ResourceShelf 2007
-
I think that differences in ontology, methodology and/or axiology cause a great deal of confusion in these discussions.
-
Or, an 150-term ontology to annotate the scientific content of your literature archive?
Tagging, thesauri or ontologies? Egon Willighagen 2007
-
The metaphor I employ to illustrate this ontology is "Author/Story".
Critique of MDT 2005
-
Inside Factual's Santa Monica office, a couple dozen engineers train computers using principles from an academic field called ontology, which is the science of categorizing words and phrases.
SFGate: Top News Stories Douglas MacMillan 2010
oroboros commented on the word ontology
I plus Not-I equals Everything offers a formula for understanding 'being'...if you think about it.
December 22, 2006
mahalie commented on the word ontology
The term ontology has its origin in philosophy, where it is the name of a fundamental branch of metaphysics concerned with existence. 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.�? - Wikipedia entry for ontology (computer science)
January 5, 2007