What’s the difference between ontologies and taxonomies?

Friday, 25 June 2010 11:18

Although these terms are often used interchangeably generally speaking, a taxonomy is a bit like a “tree” of structured information, whereas an “ontology” is a like a “forest”, and might be made of up of many taxonomies.

Ontologies are also more carefully defined to model a broad domain with the intricacies of linking some topics to others.   This ability to group terms into classes ( a taxonomy might be one class of information) and define specific named relationships between classes differentiates the ontology from the taxonomy.