Ontology

Ontology:
• From Philosophy- “A theory of what exists in the world”
• “Ontology is specification of conceptualization”
• Designed for reuse across multiple applications
• An ontology is a set of definitions in a formal language for terms describing the world
• Ontology is model of knowledge.
• Dictionary +? = Taxonomy
• Taxonomy +? = Ontology
Ontology is simply a family of objects

Some reasons for ontology:
• Facilitate Concept Based Search
• Analysis of domain knowledge.
• Sharing of common understanding of the structure of information among people or software.
• Making domain assumptions explicit.
• Reuse of domain knowledge.