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