Ontology

In computer science and information science, an ontology is a formal representation of knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the entities within that domain, and may be used to describe the domain.

In theory, an ontology is a "formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation".[1] An ontology provides a shared vocabulary, which can be used to model a domain — that is, the type of objects and/or concepts that exist, and their properties and relations.[2]

Ontologies are used in artificial intelligence, the Semantic Web, systems engineering, software engineering, biomedical informatics, library science, enterprise bookmarking, and information architecture as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it. The creation of domain ontologies is also fundamental to the definition and use of an enterprise architecture framework.