| ontology 1. A systematic account of Existence. 2. (From philosophy) An explicit formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them. For systems, what "exists" is that which can be represented. When the about a is represented in a , the set of objects that can be represented is called the . We can describe the ontology of a program by defining a set of representational terms. Definitions associate the names of entities in the (e.g. classes, relations, functions or other objects) with human-readable text describing what the names mean, and formal that constrain the interpretation and well-formed use of these terms. Formally, an ontology is the statement of a . A set of that share the same ontology will be able to communicate about a domain of discourse without necessarily operating on a globally shared theory. We say that an agent commits to an ontology if its observable actions are consistent with the definitions in the ontology. The idea of ontological commitment is based on the perspective. 3. The hierarchical structuring of knowledge about things by subcategorising them according to their essential (or at least relevant and/or cognitive) qualities. See . This is an extension of the previous senses of "ontology" (above) which has become common in discussions about the difficulty of maintaining . (1997-04-09) |
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