'ontology' appears in these pages
13ii26, reordered 14ii26
OED ontology, and Object-oriented Ontology (OOO) (Feb 26)
...Ontology is the philosophical study of existence
Kastrup Dreamed Up Reality: Diving into the Mind to Uncover the Astonishing Hidden Tale of Nature
ontology; that is, the study of the true nature of being and existence. Indeed, science models the relationships between things, but is surprisingly limited in clarifying their underlying nature.
James Tang 7ii26
What is Ontology? Why I have never heard of it? James Tang at Medium 20i26 ...the definition of Palantir Ontology:
An Ontology is a categorization of the world. In Foundry, the Ontology is the digital twin of an organization, a rich semantic layer that sits on top of the digital assets (datasets and models) integrated into Foundry. The Foundry Ontology creates a complete picture of an organization's world by mapping datasets and models to object types, properties, link types, and action types.
Ontology — the philosophical study of existence and the computer science practice of defining relationships between concepts — is often touted in academia as essential for organizing knowledge. If it's so useful, why is the term virtually absent from the engineering trenches of the world's biggest technology companies?
My answer is not that these companies ignore ontology but relying on it so fundamentally that it has been abstracted, rebranded, and woven into the very fabric of their infrastructure.
...In computer science and information science, an ontology is a formal naming and definition of the types, properties, and interrelationships of the entities that really exist for a particular domain of discourse.
...When Google launched its Knowledge Graph in 2012, they weren't inventing a new concept; they were industrializing ontology.
...Ontology is currently experiencing a massive resurgence in importance due to Generative AI and Agentic AI.
Matsutake Notebook
...Scholars of ontology—which briefly means a theory about the nature of being or what it means to have existence—suggest that each cultural group lives in its own world, which necessarily presents the idea of plural worlds.
...ontologists have sometimes criticized their fellow anthropologists for holding other cultural worlds at arm's length (dismissing them as "myths," "legends," and "beliefs") and conflating the world of their own culture as the world; ontologists, on the other hand, take other cultural worlds seriously in and of themselves, as fully rich worlds that are each unique. (pg 21)
Metamodern Paradigm
...63. To see that every person has a three-dimensional view of reality of her own, consisting of an ontology (a strong sense of what is real), an ideology (a strong sense what is right) and a self (a strong sense of one's own place in reality)—and that these three dimensions can be described in a pattern of sequentially unfolding developmental stages.
shabajee
...Broadly speaking, an ontology is a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptual model; it describes the terms used and their relationships in a machine-readable manner...
Ontologies in the Behavioral Sciences National Academies Press (pdf)
...Ontologies—systems for assigning definitions to the
concepts that are important in a particular domain—sound arcane but are in
fact fundamental to scientific progress
Converting a controlled vocabulary into an ontology: the case of GEM
Jian Qin & Stephen Paling
...Ontologies, as a form of knowledge representation, are defined as a systematic account of existence, a specification of a conceptualization (Gruber, 1993a). They represent a domain of discourse, and allow for relationships such as the definition of classes, relations, and functions.
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Tyson Yunkaporta
...I use many other terms that I don't particularly like, such as "Dreaming" (which is a mistranslation and misinterpretation), because a lot of the old people I respect, and who have passed knowledge on to me, use these words. It's not my place to disrespect them by rejecting their vocabulary choices. I know and they know what they mean, so we might as well just use those labels. In any case, it is almost impossible to speak in English without them, unless you want to say, "suprarational interdimensional ontology endogenous to custodial ritual complexes" every five minutes. So "Dreaming" it is. (pg19)
Panpsychism Notebook
Panpsychism and the Ontology of Mind
a belief that there is something fundamentally, ontologically unique about the brains of higher animals, and that they alone among all the physical structures of the universe can support mental processes. This second point seems reasonable at first glance, but upon reflection is almost inconceivable; we have not a trace of a theory that would account for such a situation, and there is no physiological data that would support it.
Realpolitik
Fisher has noted that over several decades, especially in the United States,"capitalist realism has successfully installed a 'business ontology' in which it is simply obvious that everything in society, including healthcare and education, should be run as a business"
...the kind of absurd irony that practically begs to be treated with surrealist black humor. The national security ontology is the stick to the business ontology's putative carrot.
...Extending this concept of gaslighting to a cultural level goes beyond the usual jaded recognition of corruption, e.g., the expectation of a certain amount of lying and greed among our politicians. Cultural gaslighting implies a more total hoodwinking at the level of capitalist realism or a national security ontology, an imposition of a whole set of ersatz socio-political assumptions.
LRBChina
...Confucius himself had avoided any discussion of gods, spirits and ontology. After the collapse of the Han dynasty no unified state ruled China for almost five hundred years, and it was precisely gods, spirits and ontology whose absence was mourned in the articulation of public life. Buddhists and Daoists rushed to fill the gap. Yet, according to Ge, the Confucian programme held its ground so successfully that it was able, ultimately, to transform Buddhism from a self-centred faith into a doctrine of brotherhood, dedicated to good works and open to lay believers (including women). It also managed to convert Daoism, with its critiques of organised ritual, into another bureaucratised religion.
Margulis
...
shall Gaia be described as an emergent system over and above the elements that it gathers together, or, on the contrary, as adhering to a relational ontology in which all "influences" in any direction are propagated on the same level?
Early June 2005
These days I'm especially interested in and exploring the implications of
affordances (I include hardware like mp3 players, and read-write environments like blogs)
and
folksonomies (out of frustration with the digital libraries model of ontology that's Authority based)
The Ontology of Digital Photographs (pdf)
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14ii26
I found myself wondering about the relationship between 'ontology' and 'keyword', and flirting wit the idea that a set of Keywords for a Domain might make a partial skeleton, or framework, or armature for an Ontology --a census of what IS, of the essentials of a Domain.
google search for 'keyword ontology' surfaces What is a keyword ontology? from biznology.com
A keyword ontology is a knowledge graph describing relationships between the keywords your target audiences frequently use in search queries and the products and services you sell. It can include other relationships as well, such as taxonomies, information architectures, social listening queries, competitors, etc.
Not that your audience always comes to the content that sells your products through search. But a large of enough sample of them do that the keywords they use tell you a lot about the information they need to ultimately buy your products. A keyword ontology helps you understand which words tend to go with which products, and how you can out think your competition to deliver the content your prospects need.
...but this isn't what I meant by 'keyword', of course.
Useful-seeming search results:
Ontology (information science) WikipediaIn information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definitions of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, or entities that pertain to one, many, or all domains of discourse. More simply, an ontology is a way of showing the properties of a subject area and how they are related, by defining a set of terms and relational expressions that represent the entities in that subject area. Every academic discipline or field, in creating its terminology, thereby lays the groundwork for an ontology. Each uses ontological assumptions to frame explicit theories, research and applications. Improved ontologies may improve problem solving within that domain, interoperability of data systems, and discoverability of data.
...In the 1980s, the AI community began to use the term ontology to refer to both a theory of a modeled world and a component of knowledge-based systems.
...Examples
Arabic Ontology Wikipedia...a linguistic ontology for the Arabic language, which can be used as an Arabic WordNet with ontologically clean content. People use it also as a tree (i.e. classification) of the concepts/meanings of the Arabic terms. It is a formal representation of the concepts that the Arabic terms convey, and its content is ontologically well-founded, and benchmarked to scientific advances and rigorous knowledge sources rather than to speakers' naïve beliefs as wordnets typically do
BabelNet Wikipedia
...a multilingual lexical-semantic knowledge graph, ontology and encyclopedic dictionary developed at the NLP group of the Sapienza University of Rome under the supervision of Roberto Navigli.[1][2] BabelNet was automatically created by linking Wikipedia to the most popular computational lexicon of the English language, WordNet.
...an encyclopedic dictionary that provides concepts and named entities lexicalized in many languages and connected with large amounts of semantic relations. Additional lexicalizations and definitions are added by linking to free-license wordnets, OmegaWiki, the English Wiktionary, Wikidata, FrameNet, VerbNet and others
By Robykiwi - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26041959
CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model Wikipedia
...an extensible ontology for concepts and information in cultural heritage and museum documentation. It is the international standard (ISO 21127:2023) for the controlled exchange of cultural heritage information.
FAO Geopolitical ontology
Linguistic Description Wikipedia
WordNet Wikipedia
...a lexical database of semantic relations between words that links words into semantic relations including synonyms, hyponyms, and meronyms. The synonyms are grouped into synsets with short definitions and usage examples. It can thus be seen as a combination and extension of a dictionary and thesaurus. Its primary use is in automatic text analysis and artificial intelligence applications.
...The database contains 155,327 words organized in 175,979 synsets for a total of 207,016 word-sense pairs; in compressed form, it is about 12 megabytes in size.[3]
It includes the lexical categories nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs but ignores prepositions, determiners and other function words.
Words from the same lexical category that are roughly synonymous are grouped into synsets, which include simplex words as well as collocations like "eat out" and "car pool." The different senses of a polysemous word form are assigned to different synsets.
Discovering the Semantics of Keywords: An Ontology-based Approach
Mauricio Espinoza et al. (pdf)
...ontologies are specifications of con-
ceptualizations
Ontologies Palantir
...An ontology is an artifact which stores ontological resources or entities, including the following:
- Object types
- Link types
- Action types
- Interfaces
- Shared properties
- Object type groups
We call these resources Ontology resources. An ontology can either be private and assigned to a single organization or shared among multiple organizations.
Ontology vs Taxonomy: What Is the Difference? topquadrant.com
An ontology defines not only concepts but the relationships between them, showing how data, entities, and ideas interact.
This makes ontologies crucial for AI models, semantic search, knowledge graphs, and enterprise systems where context and meaning are essential.
A taxonomy, by contrast, organizes information into a simpler hierarchical structure, where each concept fits within a single category.
Taxonomies are powerful for classification and navigation, helping users group and locate information efficiently.
Ontology: A Difficult Keyword David Bond and Lucas Bessire (2014)
Ontology is hard to ignore in contemporary anthropology. From conference abstracts to journal word clouds and job descriptions, ontology is fast becoming a new keyword in marquee debates as well as in the unfolding identity and direction of the discipline. Yet, as even the most sophisticated participants and observers soon realize, the word itself is elusive and polysemous. It holds in unresolved tension diverse semantic genealogies, opposed spatiotemporal scales, and various materialist registers. This animating tension couples profound insights with lively disagreements. At the very least, perhaps we can all agree: Ontology is an instrumentally difficult word.
full text (pdf)
15II26
some searches re: the lexicon-ontology relationship
Ontology and the LexiconOntologies and lexicons enjoy a complex relationship. Although words denote concepts and concepts make up ontologies, a lexicon is at best an ersatz ontology: there is no clear mapping between the words and word relationships that it contains and the concepts and concept relationships in an ontology. The reasons for this include the following: Word senses overlap in complex ways; many concepts are not lexicalized in some or all languages; and languages make semantic distinctions that are not ontological. Nonetheless, a lexicon can sometimes be the basis for the development of a practical ontology.
Lexicon, Ontology and Text Meaning
B Onyshkevych (1991)
Ontology and Lexicon: The Missing Link
Fadi Badra et al.
Ontology and the Lexicon: A Natural Language Processing Perspective
Ontologies, text and the lexicon
N. Aussenac-Gilles (pdf)
...The main difference between an ontology and a lexicon,
lexical database or thesaurus is that all of the latter are
linguistic objects while ontologies are not (they are
logical theories). (Ciminao, Volker, Buitelaar, 2010)
Lexicon Model for Ontologies: Community Report, 10 May 2016 (Ontology-Lexica Community Group)
Semantic Model vs Ontology vs Knowledge Graph: Untangling the latest data modeling terminology Cassi at Medium