While working on my Master’s qualification text (2013), I included a brief introduction about Ontology. This part did not make it to the final Dissertation text, so it was never published anywhere. Hence this post here, with the adapted content below. More information about my Master’s degree can be found here.
Ontology
“Ontology” is a philosophical discipline, a branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and organization of being. The term “Ontology” was introduced by Aristotle in Metaphysics, IV, 1. In the context of research on “Ontology”, philosophers attempt to answer questions such as “what is being?” and “what are the common characteristics of all beings?”. This term, when capitalized (“Ontology”), differs from the lowercase term (“ontology”), which, from a philosophical perspective, can refer to a particular system of categories representing a certain view of the world (MAEDCHE; STAAB, 2001).
Shadbolt, Berners-Lee, and Hall (2006) define ontology as “an attempt to define more carefully parts of a data world and permit interactions between data stored in different formats”.
In recent decades, ontology has become a topic of interest in computer science. It represents an engineering artifact consisting of a specific vocabulary used to describe a certain reality, plus a set of assumptions about the intended meaning of that vocabulary. This vocabulary is represented as unary and binary predicates, called concepts and relations, respectively. Visually, concepts are nodes, and relations connect these nodes (as edges or links).
This is the structure used to represent the NELL’s knowledge base for never-ending language learning, which this work aims to expand.
…