Lexicon · The human story of meaning
Ontology
Fully specified name: Ontology (concept)
An account of entities in a domain and the relationships among them. Formal ontologies make selected commitments explicit for computational use.
- Scope note
- Philosophical and computational meanings overlap but are not interchangeable.
- Synonyms
- None recorded as true synonyms in this context.
- Monograph
- Ontology (draft)
- External mappings
- None recorded. In W0 no mapping to SNOMED CT® or any external authority is asserted for this entry. A future mapping record will carry source system, identifier, version, relation type, evidence, author, confidence where meaningful, and review state.
- Formal status
- Editorial entry only. It is not part of any released ontology and a prose edit here changes no formal definition.
Draft. This entry is an unreviewed draft. Its sources have not been checked by a named person and no domain reviewer has approved it. Treat every claim as provisional.
Notes
In philosophy, ontology is the study of what exists and of the categories under which things fall: substance and property, class and individual, process and state. In informatics, an ontology is an artifact: a set of classes, properties, and axioms written in a formal language such as OWL (Web Ontology Language) so that software can check consistency and derive consequences. The two uses share a concern with categories and their relations but differ in purpose. A philosopher asks what the world contains; an informatician decides what a system will commit to representing, and records only that.
For a physician or radiochemist the practical point is that an ontology states what kinds of things are being talked about (a radionuclide is not a radiopharmaceutical; a target is not its expression) and how those kinds relate. A list of names is not an ontology, and neither is a hierarchy without stated relationship types. The monograph develops the distinction and works through a synthetic nuclear medicine example.