Ontologies

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A structured framework for organizing information and knowledge, often utilizing concepts, categories, and their relationships within a particular domain
2. Systems or models that define the representation of information, focusing on the types of entities and their interconnections in a specific area of study
3. The study and categorization of entities within a given domain to facilitate understanding and sharing of knowledge among users and systems

Etymology: Aristotle's word for the study of being is the root of this one, but the modern sense owes almost nothing to him. The Greek "ontos" meant "being" and "logia" meant "study of," so "ontologia" was a rare Latin-form coinage in the 1600s for the branch of philosophy asking what exists. The plural "ontologies" in its current sense arrived much later, when computer scientists borrowed the term for a formal description of concepts and the relationships between them in a field of knowledge. The shift happened in the 1990s, when researchers building artificial intelligence and database systems needed a way to tell machines what categories existed in a domain and how they connected. Philosophers had claimed the word for questions about reality; engineers repurposed it for a practical inventory of terms and links. The philosophical sense survives alongside the technical one, so the same word can name both a discipline and a diagram.

Synonyms: frameworks, theories