Applied ontology is the application of Ontology for practical purposes. This can involve employing ontological methods or resources to specific domains, [1] such as management, relationships, biomedicine, information science or geography. [2] [3] Alternatively, applied ontology can aim more generally at developing improved methodologies for recording and organizing knowledge. [4]
Much[ quantify ] work in applied ontology is carried out within the framework of the Semantic Web. [5] [6] Ontologies can structure data and add useful semantic content to it, such as definitions of classes and relations between entities, including subclass relations. The semantic web makes use of languages designed to allow for ontological content, including the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL).
The challenge of applying ontology is ontology's emphasis on a world view orthogonal to epistemology. The emphasis is on being rather than on doing (as implied by "applied") or on knowing. This is explored by philosophers and pragmatists like Fernando Flores and Martin Heidegger.
One way in which that emphasis plays out is in the concept of "speech acts": acts of promising, ordering, apologizing, requesting, inviting or sharing. The study of these acts from an ontological perspective is one of the driving forces behind relationship-oriented applied ontology. [7] This can involve concepts championed by ordinary language philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Applying ontology can also involve looking at the relationship between a person's world and that person's actions. The context or clearing is highly influenced by the being of the subject or the field of being itself. This view is highly influenced by the philosophy of phenomenology, [8] the works of Heidegger, and others. [9] [10]
Social scientists adopt a number of approaches to ontology. [11] Some of these are: [12]
Ontologies can be used for structuring data in a machine-readable manner. [14] In this context, an ontology is a controlled vocabulary of classes that can be placed in hierarchical relations with each other. [15] These classes can represent entities in the real world which data is about. Data can then be linked to the formal structure of these ontologies to aid dataset interoperability, along with retrieval and discovery of information. [16] [17] The classes in an ontology can be limited to a relatively narrow domain (such as an ontology of occupations), [18] or expansively cover all of reality with highly general classes (such as in Basic Formal Ontology). [15]
Applied ontology is a quickly growing field. It has found major applications in areas such as biological research, [19] artificial intelligence, [20] banking, [21] healthcare, [22] and defense. [23]
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the basic structure of reality. It is often characterized as first philosophy, implying that it is more fundamental than other forms of philosophical inquiry. Metaphysics is traditionally seen as the study of mind-independent features of the world, but some modern theorists understand it as an inquiry into the conceptual schemes that underlie human thought and experience.
Ontology is the philosophical study of being. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of reality and every entity within it. To articulate the basic structure of being, ontology examines what all entities have in common and how they are divided into fundamental classes, known as categories. An influential distinction is between particular and universal entities. Particulars are unique, non-repeatable entities, like the person Socrates. Universals are general, repeatable entities, like the color green. Another contrast is between concrete objects existing in space and time, like a tree, and abstract objects existing outside space and time, like the number 7. Systems of categories aim to provide a comprehensive inventory of reality, employing categories such as substance, property, relation, state of affairs, and event.
The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.
In 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. The field which studies ontologies so conceived is sometimes referred to as applied ontology.
Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. As necessary, hermeneutics may include the art of understanding and communication.
Phenomenology is the philosophical study of objectivity and, more generally, reality as subjectively lived and experienced. It seeks to investigate the universal features of consciousness while avoiding assumptions about the external world, aiming to describe phenomena as they appear to the subject, and to explore the meaning and significance of the lived experiences.
Applied philosophy is a branch of philosophy that studies philosophical problems of practical concern. The topic covers a broad spectrum of issues in environment, medicine, science, engineering, policy, law, politics, economics and education. The term was popularised in 1982 by the founding of the Society for Applied Philosophy by Brenda Almond, and its subsequent journal publication Journal of Applied Philosophy edited by Elizabeth Brake. Methods of applied philosophy are similar to other philosophical methods including questioning, dialectic, critical discussion, rational argument, systematic presentation, thought experiments and logical argumentation.
Object–role modeling (ORM) is used to model the semantics of a universe of discourse. ORM is often used for data modeling and software engineering.
The term conceptual model refers to any model that is formed after a conceptualization or generalization process. Conceptual models are often abstractions of things in the real world, whether physical or social. Semantic studies are relevant to various stages of concept formation. Semantics is fundamentally a study of concepts, the meaning that thinking beings give to various elements of their experience.
Barry Smith is an academic working in the field of Applied Ontology. Smith is the author of more than 700 scientific publications, including 15 authored or edited books. He is one of the most widely cited living philosophers.
In information science, an upper ontology is an ontology that consists of very general terms that are common across all domains. An important function of an upper ontology is to support broad semantic interoperability among a large number of domain-specific ontologies by providing a common starting point for the formulation of definitions. Terms in the domain ontology are ranked under the terms in the upper ontology, e.g., the upper ontology classes are superclasses or supersets of all the classes in the domain ontologies.
Semantic integration is the process of interrelating information from diverse sources, for example calendars and to do lists, email archives, presence information, documents of all sorts, contacts, search results, and advertising and marketing relevance derived from them. In this regard, semantics focuses on the organization of and action upon information by acting as an intermediary between heterogeneous data sources, which may conflict not only by structure but also context or value.
Ontotext is a software company that produces software relating to data management. Its main products are GraphDB, an RDF database; and Ontotext Platform, a general data management platform based on knowledge graphs. It was founded in 2000 in Bulgaria, and now has offices internationally. Together with the BBC, Ontotext developed one of the early large-scale industrial semantic applications, Dynamic Semantic Publishing, starting in 2010.
DOGMA, short for Developing Ontology-Grounded Methods and Applications, is the name of research project in progress at Vrije Universiteit Brussel's STARLab, Semantics Technology and Applications Research Laboratory. It is an internally funded project, concerned with the more general aspects of extracting, storing, representing and browsing information.
Ontology-based data integration involves the use of one or more ontologies to effectively combine data or information from multiple heterogeneous sources. It is one of the multiple data integration approaches and may be classified as Global-As-View (GAV). The effectiveness of ontology‑based data integration is closely tied to the consistency and expressivity of the ontology used in the integration process.
Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a top-level ontology developed by Barry Smith and his associates for the purposes of promoting interoperability among domain ontologies built in its terms through a process of downward population. A guide to building BFO-conformant domain ontologies was published by MIT Press in 2015.
In computer science, information science and systems engineering, ontology engineering is a field which studies the methods and methodologies for building ontologies, which encompasses a representation, formal naming and definition of the categories, properties and relations between the concepts, data and entities of a given domain of interest. In a broader sense, this field also includes a knowledge construction of the domain using formal ontology representations such as OWL/RDF. A large-scale representation of abstract concepts such as actions, time, physical objects and beliefs would be an example of ontological engineering. Ontology engineering is one of the areas of applied ontology, and can be seen as an application of philosophical ontology. Core ideas and objectives of ontology engineering are also central in conceptual modeling.
Knowledge extraction is the creation of knowledge from structured and unstructured sources. The resulting knowledge needs to be in a machine-readable and machine-interpretable format and must represent knowledge in a manner that facilitates inferencing. Although it is methodically similar to information extraction (NLP) and ETL, the main criterion is that the extraction result goes beyond the creation of structured information or the transformation into a relational schema. It requires either the reuse of existing formal knowledge or the generation of a schema based on the source data.
In information science a conceptualization is an abstract simplified view of some selected part of the world, containing the objects, concepts, and other entities that are presumed of interest for some particular purpose and the relationships between them. An explicit specification of a conceptualization is an ontology, and it may occur that a conceptualization can be realized by several distinct ontologies. An ontological commitment in describing ontological comparisons is taken to refer to that subset of elements of an ontology shared with all the others. "An ontology is language-dependent", its objects and interrelations described within the language it uses, while a conceptualization is always the same, more general, its concepts existing "independently of the language used to describe it". The relation between these terms is shown in the figure to the right.
The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). is an ontological framework developed in the early 2000s with the objective of providing foundational support for conceptual modeling. It synthesizes elements from formal ontology, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophical logic to inform the structure and semantics of conceptual models. The ontology is utilized to articulate a variety of fundamental notions within conceptual modeling, offering a systematic approach to categorizing entities and delineating their properties.
Applied ontology, also called domain ontology, is concerned (i) with the question of what entities exist in a particular domain, for example, in the domain of a scientific branch such as biology, or even in the more specialized domain of a scientific theory such as the theory of active immunity; and (ii) with the formal taxonomy of those entities.
The authors' goal in producing this book has been to show how philosophy and information science can learn from one another, so as to create better methodologies for recording and organizing our knowledge about the world.
Talk all you want to, Flores says, but if you want to act powerfully, you need to master 'speech acts': language rituals that build trust between colleagues and customers, word practices that open your eyes to new possibilities. Speech acts are powerful because most of the actions that people engage in -- in business, in marriage, in parenting -- are carried out through conversation.