Ontology (computer science)

In computer science, an ontology is the attempt to formulate an exhaustive and rigorous conceptual schema within a given domain, a typically hierarchical data structure containing all the relevant entities and their relationships and rules within that domain.

This is different from but related to the philosophical meaning of the word ontology, the study of existence.

Ontologies are commonly used in artificial intelligence and knowledge representation. Computer programs can use an ontology for a variety of purposes including inductive reasoning, classification, a variety of problem solving techniques, as well as to facilitate communication and sharing of information between different systems.

An ontology which is not tied to a particular problem domain but attempts to describe general entities is known as a foundation ontology or upper ontology. Typically, more specialized schema must be created to make the data useful for real world decisions.

Such ontologies are commercially valuable, creating competition to define them. Peter Murray-Rust[?] has claimed that this leads to "semantic and ontological warfare due to competing standards", and accordingly any standard foundation ontology is likely to be contested among commercial or political parties, each with their own idea of 'what exists' (in the philosophical sense).

Available ontologies

A well-known and quite comprehensive ontology available today is Cyc, a proprietary system consisting of a foundation ontology and several domain-specific ontologies (called microtheories). A subset of that ontology has been released for free under the name OpenCyc.

WordNet, originally just an innovative freely available dictionary, can also be seen to define an upper ontology via its hierarchy of inclusion relationships.

The Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) is another attempt to define an upper ontology, created by an IEEE working group and freely available.

See also:

• Semantic Web
• Ontology Language
• Ontology (Philosophy)