Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The field of information systems involves significant bodies of new knowledge about technologies, systems, data, information, and domains in which systems are applied. It is important to have a well‐controlled vocabulary for describing, representing, and sharing this knowledge. The term ontology is used for a knowledge representation in information systems; since there are several different applications for ontology, there are several “ontologies” in the field. The ontology concept is derived from metaphysics, but in the field of information systems it is used in the limited sense of a specification of concepts and relationships within a defined domain of information system knowledge. Note that it is common in information systems to use the term ontology to refer not only to the concepts of ontology, but also to the knowledge specifications. In metaphysics, ontology is the study of being with regard to the aspect or essence of being or existence. More specifically, ontology deals with fundamental categories of things that exist or generic concepts that represent elements of the world. Different philosophers have different views on what the fundamental categories of being are. In the context of the information systems discipline, ontology consists of unambiguous specifications of a set of representational concepts for a shared domain of discourse or shared knowledge about information ... log in or subscribe to read full text