Information Modeling and Relational Databases, 2nd Edition

16.6. Ontologies and the Semantic Web

Etymologically, the term “ontology” means the study of existence. In philosophy, ontology is the branch of metaphysics concerned with the fundamental nature of being, addressing deep questions such as “Do nonphysical things exist?”, “Does an object remain identical to itself when it undergoes change”, and so on. The informatics community later adopted the term “ontology”, typically using it to mean a conceptual model about some business domain, where the model is designed to facilitate sharing information about that domain by conforming to some standard set of constructs.

With the rise of the Internet, millions of documents are now readily accessible over the World Wide Web. However, these documents were ...