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Martin Laplante

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Sun, 23 Oct 2005

What is "an Ontology"

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Jim Harris wrote

Information Architect
In your Paragraph 3 you say, "It is called 'ontology', not 'an ontology'."

Martin Laplante wrote

The philosophical discipline that deals with relationships among things does not have an article. The computer science term "ontology" does have an article and refers to a given formal symbolic representation of the relationships between predicates. Computer science needed a word for that and borrowed the analogous term from philosophy, recognizing that each of these ontological representations or "ontologies" are independent. In the same way, the term "a taxonomy" (a given hierarchical representation) is derived from the term "taxonomy" (the science of classification, related to systematics). The two are not the same and using the same term for two different things in the same field leads to confusion.

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