Ontology
A formal representation of knowledge within a domain that defines concepts, categories, properties, and the relationships between them. It provides a shared vocabulary and structure for organizing information.
Why It Matters
Ontologies enable machines to understand domain-specific knowledge and reason about it. They are critical for healthcare AI, legal tech, and enterprise knowledge management.
Example
A medical ontology defining that 'aspirin' is a type of 'NSAID,' which is a type of 'anti-inflammatory drug,' which is a type of 'medication' — with properties like dosage and contraindications.
Think of it like...
Like a taxonomy poster in a biology classroom showing Kingdom → Phylum → Class → Order → Family → Genus → Species — it organizes everything into a clear hierarchy.
Related Terms
Knowledge Graph
A structured representation of real-world entities and the relationships between them, stored as a network of nodes (entities) and edges (relationships). Knowledge graphs capture factual information in a machine-readable format.
Semantic Web
A vision for extending the World Wide Web so that data is machine-readable and interconnected through shared standards and ontologies. It enables automated reasoning and knowledge discovery.