Definition according to Webster's Dictionary:
Recently, the term of "(formal) ontology" has been up taken by researchers in Artificial Intelligence, who use it to designate the building blocks out of which models of the world are made.(see e.g. "What is an ontology?"). An agent (e.g. an autonomous robot) using a particular model will only be able to perceive that part of the world that his ontology is able to represent. In a sense, only the things in his ontology can exist for that agent. In that way, an ontology becomes the basic level of a knowledge representation scheme. See for example my set of link types for a semantic network representation which is based on a set of "ontological" distinctions: changing-invariant, and general-specific.
Created on ... août 01, 2003