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Ontology or Ontologies

Essentially a formal model for sharing knowledge, an ontology is concerned with defining topics and placing them in context of a class, with properties and relationships to other topics.

More extensive than a taxonomy, an ontology refers to the classes of information (or categories) within a domain and the relationships between those categories.  Critically, the relationship must be able to be defined and convey meaning - consider it the next stage from a standard "related to" associative relationship in a thesauri.

 

One ontology can vary widely from the next ontology, not only when it comes to their content, but also in the way that they are implemented and in the ontology’s structure. This is why it is possible to build an ontology (or several) which specifically fits the needs of your company or organization when it comes to managing your information An ontology can be built to understand a particular vocabulary set which is unique to your informational needs or industry, known as a common language for your ontology. This can be a great asset when using your ontology to discover certain industry-relevant information, especially when that data is held in different databases, content repositories and systems.

 

Application for Information Management

An ontology defines the properties and attributes of content within your domain. The ontology, or semantic model is also able to understand the relationships between different pieces of information. The ontology is able to judge the meaning of content rather than just its literal values and also the application of this data to the purpose of your business or organization. An ontology is perfectly suited to defining knowledge, its attributes and its relationships to other content. An Ontology is created to understand the logic of its user (which may be abstract when compared to usual information management tools) in order to process information semantically. This means that the ontology can be used to integrate databases and huge amounts of information and content from across different systems. This makes an ontology an extremely useful tool in the management and retrieval of your knowledge base and content repositories.

 

Application for Information Retrieval

 

An Ontology is devised to be rich in defining those semantic relationships between pieces of information. This increases the number of possible ways in which information can be related, the ontology adding new levels of depth to your information searching and queries. An ontology is designed to effectively communicate the meaning of the terms which are defined by your application of the software and the ontology uses natural language to document these definitions. The ontology will be coherent and understandable, whether the definitions are made using formal or informal, more human-friendly, language. The ontology will be designed specifically for your needs of the application, meaning that the ontology offers a range of anticipated tasks and the ability to define new uses as and when you require it of your ontology.

Related Information

Semaphore Ontology Manager is a software tool designed to facilitate multiple users to develop and build ontologies and tailor them for use in applications.

For further reference on ontologies, the Wikipedia article on this subject is found under Ontology (information science), bearing in mind that "ontology" has two definitions.

  • From philosophy, ontology refers to the study of existence or being, derived from the two Greek words (ontos) meaning “to be” and (logos) meaning “word.”
  • “In computer science and information science, an ontology is a formal representation of the knowledge by a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the properties of that domain, and may be used to describe the domain.” – Wikipedia.

For Smartlogic, we work with the latter.   An ontology is a domain model as one of a recognised Knowledge Organizing Systems (KOS).   We model the concepts as Preferred Terms and the hierarchical and associative relationships between them provide context and meaning.