Ontology : Dictionary / Wörterbuch (BEOLINGUS, TU Chemnitz)

English Dictionary: Ontology	by the DICT Development Group
3 results for Ontology
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
ontology 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 the metaphysical study of the nature of being and existence
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Ontology \Ontol"ogy\, n. [Gr. [?] the things which exist (pl.neut. of [?], [?], being, p. pr. of [?] to be) + -logy: cf.F. ontologie.] 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.
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (15Feb98) [foldoc]:
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 {AI} systems, what "exists" is that which can be represented. When the {knowledge} about a {domain} is represented in a {declarative language}, the set of objects that can be represented is called the {universe of discourse}. We can describe the ontology of a program by defining a set of representational terms. Definitions associate the names of entities in the {universe of discourse} (e.g. classes, relations, functions or other objects) with human-readable text describing what the names mean, and formal {axioms} that constrain the interpretation and well-formed use of these terms. Formally, an ontology is the statement of a {logical theory}. A set of {agents} 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 {Knowledge-Level} 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 {subject index}. This is an extension of the previous senses of "ontology" (above) which has become common in discussions about the difficulty of maintaining {subject indices}. (1997-04-09)