• Log In

The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast

A Philosophy Podcast and Philosophy Blog

Subscribe on Android Spotify Google Podcasts audible patreon
  • Home
  • Podcast
    • PEL Network Episodes
    • Publicly Available PEL Episodes
    • Paywalled and Ad-Free Episodes
    • PEL Episodes by Topic
    • Nightcap
    • Philosophy vs. Improv
    • Pretty Much Pop
    • Nakedly Examined Music
    • (sub)Text
    • Phi Fic Podcast
    • Combat & Classics
    • Constellary Tales
  • Blog
  • About
    • PEL FAQ
    • Meet PEL
    • About Pretty Much Pop
    • Philosophy vs. Improv
    • Nakedly Examined Music
    • Meet Phi Fic
    • Listener Feedback
    • Links
  • Join
    • Become a Citizen
    • Join Our Mailing List
    • Log In
  • Donate
  • Store
    • Episodes
    • Swag
    • Everything Else
    • Cart
    • Checkout
    • My Account
  • Contact
  • Mailing List

Applied Ontology?

July 8, 2011 by Mark Linsenmayer 6 Comments

NCOR crapI stumbled across a presentation from the National Center for Ontological Research (NCOR)'s Ontology Summit 2011 which declares NCOR's goals to "advance ontology as a science" and "foster development of high quality ontologies" and "develop measures of quality for ontologies to establish best practices."

Clearly, these people mean something different by "ontology" than, say, Husserl. According to ncor.us:

Ontology is both a branch of philosophy and a fast-growing component of computer science concerned with the development of formal representations of the entities and relations existing in a variety of application domains. Ontology has been shown to have considerable potential on the level of both pure research and applications. It provides foundations for diverse technologies in areas such as information integration, natural language processing, data annotation, and the construction of intelligent computer systems.

This is made somewhat clearer by this section called "Defining Ontology" on the wiki page under "Ontology Driven Implementation of Semantic Services for the Enterprise Environment (ODISSEE) Workshop:"

An ontology is a representation of some part of reality, (e.g. medicine, social reality, physics, etc.). Smith states that: “Ontology is the science of what is, of the kinds and structures of objects, properties, events, processes and relations in every area of reality…Ontology seeks to provide a definitive and exhaustive classification of entities in all spheres of being.” To be an accurate representation of reality an ontology includes the types of entities and events in a given domain (along with their definitions) arranged in a hierarchical structure, along with relations (such as part-of, depends-on, caused-by, etc. where necessary). Ontologies enable the formulation of robust and shareable descriptions of a given domain by providing a common controlled vocabulary for doctrine writers, IT Developers, and war-fighters alike, thereby allowing these disparate communities to communicate with each other. An ontology should be a shared resource between communities, and its continued collaborative development should support the integration of information and facilitate knowledge discovery.

With all this collaborative facilitation and integration across robust, annotative domains, I'm pretty sure this is all just a secret strategy to get people to hate philosophy.

-Mark Linsenmayer

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailby feather

Filed Under: Web Detritus

Comments

  1. no one says

    July 9, 2011 at 2:03 am

    Sounds like a huge waste of money. I agree with Hubert Dryfus.

    Reply
  2. nobody says

    July 14, 2011 at 5:14 pm

    Ontologies are not restricted to the discipline of artificial intelligence. Ontologies are used to investigate the information in general, within several sub-areas of computer science, information science, etc. They are the key of semantic interoperability across distinct domains, allowing the actors of different domains to speack about the same things, conscious that are the same things.

    Reply
  3. Mark Linsenmayer says

    July 15, 2011 at 11:32 am

    Despite my snark in this post, I do see the point, but ontology then becomes not the philosophical investigation of fundamental furniture of the universe, but a matter of elaborating structures and taxonomies in disciplines, addressing the need for communications across disciplines. I’m not familiar enough with the endeavor to say whether philosophers have any special expertise to do this, or exactly what kinds of cross-discipline projects it’s useful for, but hopefully this link will provide those interested with the means to look into those questions further.

    Reply
  4. Peter Hardy says

    May 6, 2013 at 12:23 pm

    I like this. Not only is that second quote how I conceive of ontology anyway, but I like the clarificatory purpose to which they are putting it.

    Reply
  5. Wayne Schroeder says

    May 6, 2013 at 7:08 pm

    This definition of ontology (an exposition of foundations of reality) descends into the ontic (taxonomies of entities within reality), as Mark indicated.

    The parts which seem to add to the ontological are
    “types of entities and events in a given domain (along with their definitions) arranged in a hierarchical structure, along with relations (such as part-of, depends-on, caused-by, etc. where necessary). Ontologies enable the formulation of robust and shareable descriptions of a given domain by providing a common controlled vocabulary.”

    Those are some possible helps, but the significant ontologies will need to break out of hierarchical structures and find another type of coding, i.e. philosophy.

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Churchland Ep. Name Drop #2: Chris Eliasmith | The Partially Examined Life | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    July 22, 2011 at 10:16 am

    […] with my recent post on applied ontology, I’ll say that this sounds too suspiciously like work to me to satisfy the urges that keep me […]

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

PEL Live Show 2023

Brothers K Live Show

Citizenship has its Benefits

Become a PEL Citizen
Become a PEL Citizen, and get access to all paywalled episodes, early and ad-free, including exclusive Part 2's for episodes starting September 2020; our after-show Nightcap, where the guys respond to listener email and chat more causally; a community of fellow learners, and more.

Rate and Review

Nightcap

Listen to Nightcap
On Nightcap, listen to the guys respond to listener email and chat more casually about their lives, the making of the show, current events and politics, and anything else that happens to come up.

Subscribe to Email Updates

Select list(s):

Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription.

Support PEL

Buy stuff through Amazon and send a few shekels our way at no extra cost to you.

Tweets by PartiallyExLife

Recent Comments

  • Seth Paskin on PEL Eulogies Nightcap Late March 2023
  • John Heath on PEL Eulogies Nightcap Late March 2023
  • Randy Strader on Ep. 309: Wittgenstein On Certainty (Part Two)
  • Wes Alwan on PEL Nightcap February 2023
  • Kunal on Why Don’t We Like Idealism?

About The Partially Examined Life

The Partially Examined Life is a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living but then thought better of it. Each episode, we pick a text and chat about it with some balance between insight and flippancy. You don’t have to know any philosophy, or even to have read the text we’re talking about to (mostly) follow and (hopefully) enjoy the discussion

Become a PEL Citizen!

As a PEL Citizen, you’ll have access to a private social community of philosophers, thinkers, and other partial examiners where you can join or initiate discussion groups dedicated to particular readings, participate in lively forums, arrange online meet-ups for impromptu seminars, and more. PEL Citizens also have free access to podcast transcripts, guided readings, episode guides, PEL music, and other citizen-exclusive material. Click here to join.

Blog Post Categories

  • (sub)Text
  • Aftershow
  • Announcements
  • Audiobook
  • Book Excerpts
  • Citizen Content
  • Citizen Document
  • Citizen News
  • Close Reading
  • Combat and Classics
  • Constellary Tales
  • Exclude from Newsletter
  • Featured Ad-Free
  • Featured Article
  • General Announcements
  • Interview
  • Letter to the Editor
  • Misc. Philosophical Musings
  • Nakedly Examined Music Podcast
  • Nakedly Self-Examined Music
  • NEM Bonus
  • Not School Recording
  • Not School Report
  • Other (i.e. Lesser) Podcasts
  • PEL Music
  • PEL Nightcap
  • PEL's Notes
  • Personal Philosophies
  • Phi Fic Podcast
  • Philosophy vs. Improv
  • Podcast Episode (Citizen)
  • Podcast Episodes
  • Pretty Much Pop
  • Reviewage
  • Song Self-Exam
  • Supporter Exclusive
  • Things to Watch
  • Vintage Episode (Citizen)
  • Web Detritus

Follow:

Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Apple Podcasts

Copyright © 2009 - 2023 · The Partially Examined Life, LLC. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy · Terms of Use · Copyright Policy

Copyright © 2023 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in