The following
outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to ontologies:
In
metaphysics, ontology is the
philosophical study of being. It investigates what types of entities exist, how they are grouped into
categories, and how they are related to one another on the most fundamental level (and whether there even is a fundamental level). Ontologists often try to determine what the categories or highest kinds are and how they form a system of categories that encompasses the classification of all entities. Commonly proposed categories include
substances,
properties,
relations,
states of affairs, and
events. These categories are characterized by fundamental ontological concepts, including particularity and universality, abstractness and concreteness, or possibility and necessity. Of special interest is the concept of ontological dependence, which determines whether the entities of a category exist on the most fundamental level. Disagreements within ontology are often about whether entities belonging to a certain category exist and, if so, how they are related to other entities.
What type of thing is an ontology?
Ontologies can be described as all of the following:
A type of tool of
knowledge representation and reasoning (KR) – KR is a field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can utilize to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medical condition or having a dialog in a natural language. Examples of knowledge representation formalisms include semantic nets, frames, rules, and ontologies.
Upper ontology – ontology which describes very general concepts that are the same across all knowledge domains.
Standard upper ontology – (IEEE P1600.1 term for a) near-universal upper ontology (or foundation ontology). Several upper ontologies are competing to become the standard.
Individuals – instances or objects (the basic or "ground level" objects)
Classes –
sets, collections, concepts, types of objects, or kinds of things.[1]
Attributes – aspects, properties, features, characteristics, or parameters that objects (and classes) can have
Relations – ways in which classes and individuals can be related to one another
Function terms – complex structures formed from certain relations that can be used in place of an individual term in a statement
Restrictions – formally stated descriptions of what must be true in order for some assertion to be accepted as input
Rules – statements in the form of an if-then (antecedent-consequent) sentence that describe the logical inferences that can be drawn from an assertion in a particular form
Axioms – assertions (including rules) in a
logical form that together comprise the overall theory that the ontology describes in its domain of application. This definition differs from that of "axioms" in generative grammar and formal logic. In these disciplines, axioms include only statements asserted as a priori knowledge. As used here, "axioms" also include the theory derived from axiomatic statements.
Friend of a Friend – ontology for describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects
Gellish English dictionary – ontology that includes a dictionary and taxonomy that includes an upper ontology and a lower ontology that focusses on industrial and business applications in engineering, technology and procurement. See also
Gellish as
Open Source project on SourceForge.
YAGO (Yet Another Great Ontology) – knowledge base developed at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science in Saarbrücken. It is automatically extracted from Wikipedia and other sources. It includes knowledge about more than 10 million entities and contains more than 120 million facts about these entities.
BioPAX[11] – ontology for the exchange and interoperability of biological pathway (cellular processes) data
CCO and GexKB[12] – Application Ontologies (APO) that integrate diverse types of knowledge with the Cell Cycle Ontology (CCO) and the Gene Expression Knowledge Base (GexKB)
Foundational Model of Anatomy[14] – reference ontology for the domain of anatomy. It is a symbolic representation of the canonical, phenotypic structure of an organism; a spatial-structural ontology of anatomical entities and relations which form the physical organization of an organism at all salient levels of granularity.
NCBO Bioportal,[15] biological and biomedical ontologies and associated tools to search, browse and visualise
OBO-Edit,[16] an ontology browser for most of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies
OBO Foundry,[17] a suite of interoperable reference ontologies in biology and biomedicine
ONSTR,[18] Ontology for Newborn Screening Follow-up and Translational Research
[1], Newborn Screening Follow-up Data Integration Collaborative, Emory University, Atlanta, GA. See also
https://nbsdc.org/projectmission.php
Plant Ontology[19] for plant structures and growth/development stages, etc.
POPE, Purdue Ontology for Pharmaceutical Engineering
SNOMED CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine -- Clinical Terms)
Upper ontology – ontology which describes very general concepts that are the same across all knowledge domains. Examples of upper ontologies include:
Basic Formal Ontology,[22] a formal upper ontology designed to support scientific research
COSMO,[23] a Foundation Ontology (current version in OWL) that is designed to contain representations of all of the primitive concepts needed to logically specify the meanings of any domain entity. It is intended to serve as a basic ontology that can be used to translate among the representations in other ontologies or databases. It started as a merger of the basic elements of the OpenCyc and SUMO ontologies, and has been supplemented with other ontology elements (types, relations) so as to include representations of all of the words in the Longman dictionary defining vocabulary.
DOLCE, a Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering
Ontology language – formal language used to construct ontologies, that allows the encoding of knowledge about specific domains. An ontology language may include reasoning rules that support the processing of that knowledge.
RDF Schema (Resource Description Framework Schema) – set of classes with certain properties using the
RDF extensible knowledge representation data model, providing basic elements for the description of ontologies, otherwise called RDF vocabularies, intended to structure RDF
web resources.
Web Ontology Language (OWL) – family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies.
Ontology engineering
Ontology engineering – building ontologies, and the field that studies the methods and methodologies for building ontologies.
Adam Pease – American computer scientist doing research in ontology and formal reasoning. He is best known as the Technical Editor of the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) upper ontology intended as a foundation ontology for a variety of computer information processing systems.
The following
outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to ontologies:
In
metaphysics, ontology is the
philosophical study of being. It investigates what types of entities exist, how they are grouped into
categories, and how they are related to one another on the most fundamental level (and whether there even is a fundamental level). Ontologists often try to determine what the categories or highest kinds are and how they form a system of categories that encompasses the classification of all entities. Commonly proposed categories include
substances,
properties,
relations,
states of affairs, and
events. These categories are characterized by fundamental ontological concepts, including particularity and universality, abstractness and concreteness, or possibility and necessity. Of special interest is the concept of ontological dependence, which determines whether the entities of a category exist on the most fundamental level. Disagreements within ontology are often about whether entities belonging to a certain category exist and, if so, how they are related to other entities.
What type of thing is an ontology?
Ontologies can be described as all of the following:
A type of tool of
knowledge representation and reasoning (KR) – KR is a field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can utilize to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medical condition or having a dialog in a natural language. Examples of knowledge representation formalisms include semantic nets, frames, rules, and ontologies.
Upper ontology – ontology which describes very general concepts that are the same across all knowledge domains.
Standard upper ontology – (IEEE P1600.1 term for a) near-universal upper ontology (or foundation ontology). Several upper ontologies are competing to become the standard.
Individuals – instances or objects (the basic or "ground level" objects)
Classes –
sets, collections, concepts, types of objects, or kinds of things.[1]
Attributes – aspects, properties, features, characteristics, or parameters that objects (and classes) can have
Relations – ways in which classes and individuals can be related to one another
Function terms – complex structures formed from certain relations that can be used in place of an individual term in a statement
Restrictions – formally stated descriptions of what must be true in order for some assertion to be accepted as input
Rules – statements in the form of an if-then (antecedent-consequent) sentence that describe the logical inferences that can be drawn from an assertion in a particular form
Axioms – assertions (including rules) in a
logical form that together comprise the overall theory that the ontology describes in its domain of application. This definition differs from that of "axioms" in generative grammar and formal logic. In these disciplines, axioms include only statements asserted as a priori knowledge. As used here, "axioms" also include the theory derived from axiomatic statements.
Friend of a Friend – ontology for describing persons, their activities and their relations to other people and objects
Gellish English dictionary – ontology that includes a dictionary and taxonomy that includes an upper ontology and a lower ontology that focusses on industrial and business applications in engineering, technology and procurement. See also
Gellish as
Open Source project on SourceForge.
YAGO (Yet Another Great Ontology) – knowledge base developed at the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science in Saarbrücken. It is automatically extracted from Wikipedia and other sources. It includes knowledge about more than 10 million entities and contains more than 120 million facts about these entities.
BioPAX[11] – ontology for the exchange and interoperability of biological pathway (cellular processes) data
CCO and GexKB[12] – Application Ontologies (APO) that integrate diverse types of knowledge with the Cell Cycle Ontology (CCO) and the Gene Expression Knowledge Base (GexKB)
Foundational Model of Anatomy[14] – reference ontology for the domain of anatomy. It is a symbolic representation of the canonical, phenotypic structure of an organism; a spatial-structural ontology of anatomical entities and relations which form the physical organization of an organism at all salient levels of granularity.
NCBO Bioportal,[15] biological and biomedical ontologies and associated tools to search, browse and visualise
OBO-Edit,[16] an ontology browser for most of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies
OBO Foundry,[17] a suite of interoperable reference ontologies in biology and biomedicine
ONSTR,[18] Ontology for Newborn Screening Follow-up and Translational Research
[1], Newborn Screening Follow-up Data Integration Collaborative, Emory University, Atlanta, GA. See also
https://nbsdc.org/projectmission.php
Plant Ontology[19] for plant structures and growth/development stages, etc.
POPE, Purdue Ontology for Pharmaceutical Engineering
SNOMED CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine -- Clinical Terms)
Upper ontology – ontology which describes very general concepts that are the same across all knowledge domains. Examples of upper ontologies include:
Basic Formal Ontology,[22] a formal upper ontology designed to support scientific research
COSMO,[23] a Foundation Ontology (current version in OWL) that is designed to contain representations of all of the primitive concepts needed to logically specify the meanings of any domain entity. It is intended to serve as a basic ontology that can be used to translate among the representations in other ontologies or databases. It started as a merger of the basic elements of the OpenCyc and SUMO ontologies, and has been supplemented with other ontology elements (types, relations) so as to include representations of all of the words in the Longman dictionary defining vocabulary.
DOLCE, a Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering
Ontology language – formal language used to construct ontologies, that allows the encoding of knowledge about specific domains. An ontology language may include reasoning rules that support the processing of that knowledge.
RDF Schema (Resource Description Framework Schema) – set of classes with certain properties using the
RDF extensible knowledge representation data model, providing basic elements for the description of ontologies, otherwise called RDF vocabularies, intended to structure RDF
web resources.
Web Ontology Language (OWL) – family of knowledge representation languages for authoring ontologies.
Ontology engineering
Ontology engineering – building ontologies, and the field that studies the methods and methodologies for building ontologies.
Adam Pease – American computer scientist doing research in ontology and formal reasoning. He is best known as the Technical Editor of the Suggested Upper Merged Ontology (SUMO) upper ontology intended as a foundation ontology for a variety of computer information processing systems.