Ontology - Philosophy or Business Tool?

When researching our new IOA courses I came across the chapter on Semantic Networks, Topic Maps and Ontologies. Especially the last term intrigued me, so I started a little digging.

Merriam-Websters defines it as follows:
on•tol•o•gy
Function: noun
Etymology: New Latin ontologia, from ont- + -logia -logy
Date: circa 1721

• A branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being
• A particular theory about the nature of being or the kind of things that have existence

Socrates, Plato and Aristotle already had some use for Ontologies, although I strongly suspect this is more to do with the second definition and nothing with the business activities we relate to in our Information Organization and Access Classes. The term itself appears for the first time in the 17th century in the works of philosophers. It concerns the existence of objects and their relationships…

And at this point I started to see the relationship with today’s business needs. Rather than a strict list like a controlled vocabulary or a Taxonomy, an Ontology uses a rich semantic relationship between terms and attributes, going into all directions and thereby building a real corpus of knowledge about a certain subject.

An example would be cars. Not only would it contain links to all kinds of cars, but also engine sizes, cars-types, car dealerships, subcontractors, shipping routes from the car plants, etc. As you can see an ontology can very quickly grow very large, but once build represent  a more or less complete overview of all knowledge about a certain topic or “domain”. Ontologies take Taxonomies and Classification to the next level. There are however standards out there to help in representing and using these ontologies with technology.

XML Topic maps have a standard XML-based interchange syntax called XML Topic Maps (XTM), as well as a de facto standard API called Common Topic Map Application Programming Interface (TMAPI), and query and schema languages are being developed within ISO

Web Ontology Language (OWL) Language for defining Web ontologies. An OWL ontology may include vocabularies, relationships, and instances. OWL is used by applications that process information rather than just present it, and facilitates computer interpretability

Resource Description Framework or RDF Schema Extensible knowledge representation language, providing information for the capture and description of ontologies

More information about Topic Maps and Semantic Networks and other ways to improve the “Findability”  can be found in our Information Organization and Access (IOA) training courses.

By Hanns Köhler-Krüner