Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. The branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The theory of being; that branch of metaphysics which investigates the nature of being and of the essence of things, both substances and accidents.
Wiktionary
- n. The branch of metaphysics that addresses the nature or essential characteristics of being and of things that exist; the study of being qua being.
- n. The theory of a particular philosopher or school of thought concerning the fundamental types of entity in the universe.
- n. A logical system involving theory of classes, developed by Stanislaw Lesniewski (1886-1939).
- n. A structure of concepts or entity within a domain, organized by relationships; a system model.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. That department of the science of metaphysics which investigates and explains the nature and essential properties and relations of all beings, as such, or the principles and causes of being.
- n. A systematic arrangement of all of the important categories of objects or concepts which exist in some field of discourse, showing the relations between them. When complete, an
ontology is a categorization of all of the concepts in some field of knowledge, including the objects and all of the properties, relations, and functions needed to define the objects and specify their actions. A simplified ontology may contain only a hierarchical classification (a taxonomy) showing the type subsumption relations between concepts in the field of discourse. Anontology may be visualized as an abstract graph with nodes and labeled arcs representing the objects and relations.
WordNet 3.0
- n. (computer science) a rigorous and exhaustive organization of some knowledge domain that is usually hierarchical and contains all the relevant entities and their relations
- n. the metaphysical study of the nature of being and existence
Examples
“Often, the term ontology is used to cover both ABox and TBox statements (which, I argue, only makes the understanding of the 'ontology' concept more difficult).”
“So, what does all of this have to do with my starting diatribe about the term ontology?”
“The term "metaphysics" (q.v.) was given a wider extension by Wolff, who divided "real philosophy" into general metaphysics, which he called ontology, and special, under which he included cosmology, psychology, and theodicy.”
“And in this paradigm, he argues that the ontology is one of nominalism, programs do not exist in the abstract but only in the concrete.”
Three Paradigms of Research in Computer Science « Beki's Blog (there's an original name)
“Without tracing the history of the notion of rights, or exploring their uncertain ontology, let me simply note here that the current concept arises from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
“This paper discusses the development of a new information representation system embodied in ontology and the Semantic Web.”
Research Paper: Ontology and the Semantic Web « ResourceShelf
“I think that differences in ontology, methodology and/or axiology cause a great deal of confusion in these discussions.”
“Or, an 150-term ontology to annotate the scientific content of your literature archive?”
“The metaphor I employ to illustrate this ontology is "Author/Story".”
“Inside Factual's Santa Monica office, a couple dozen engineers train computers using principles from an academic field called ontology, which is the science of categorizing words and phrases.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘ontology’.
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-ism's -logies
acosmism, absurdism, absolutism, ableism, aestheticism, alarmism, allotheism, anachronism, animalculism, analogism, animatism, animism and 464 more...
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Ultimates
ultimate, penultimate, The Ultimates, Ultimate Frisbee, Ultimate, Ultimate!, preantepenultimate, antepenultimate, Ultimate Fighting..., ultimate cause, somersaultimate, resultimate and 25 more...
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Philosophical Shit
Thought-provokers; words that ask more questions than they answer.
meta, semantic, signify, sign, autological, heterological, ontology, hylozoism, abiogenesis, anima, homoiconicity, anthropomorphism and 3 more...
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Web 2.0 Buzzword Bingo
A list useful to anyone bored in technical meetings.
ontology, interface, dataset, leveraging, pathway, embrace, workflow, matrix, arrangement, reproducibility, ownership, ugc and 1 more...
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Linguistic Terms
Words that (mostly) only linguists know.
arpabet, protologism, diacritic, macron, macaronic, capitonym, grapheme, boustrophedon, allograph, analphabetic, idiomatic, portmanteau and 39 more...
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JessIsWhy's list
I often wonder about the origin of words. When ever I find out that a word comes from a Latin, Greek or other word I wonder, "Then where did that word come from?" So I recently looked up the study ...
nephrology, otolaryngology, philom, self-aggrandize, memetics, craneometry, epicurean, epicureanism, diogenes, oenoanda, hermeneutical, ontology and 3 more...
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philosophical concepts
Different concepts and branches of philosophy which haven't become independent fields of investigation. For example, "physicalism" is valid but not "physics", "scientism" but not "science", "cogni...
philosophy, ontology, epistemology, ethics, logic, nominalism, analytic philosophy, semiotics, structuralism, deconstructionism, postmodernism, skepticism and 40 more...
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phil vocab 3
genocide, superfluous, warfare, indissoluble, sentient, confound, pernicious, dispose, render, amiable, paradox, puritanical and 36 more...
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fancy essay words
hiatus, ontology, exegesis, hermeneutics, dialectics, demiurge, ascertain, contention, eschatological, synecdoche, centripetal, centrifugal and 86 more...
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onto-, ont-
of or relating to existence
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-geny
denoting a mode of production
orogeny, phylogeny, ontology, embryology, climatology, entomology, progeny, endogeny
mahalie The term ontology has its origin in philosophy, where it is the name of a fundamental branch of metaphysics concerned with existence. According to Tom Gruber at Stanford University, the meaning of ontology in the context of computer science, however, is “a description of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents.�? He goes on to specify that an ontology is generally written, “as a set of definitions of formal vocabulary.�? - Wikipedia entry for ontology (computer science) Jan 5, 2007
oroboros I plus Not-I equals Everything offers a formula for understanding 'being'...if you think about it. Dec 22, 2006