A review of ontologies with the semantic web in view; byYing Ding/My thoughts, J. Colannino

In general parlance, a thesaurus is a book of synonyms, a taxonomy is classification scheme, a vocabulary is a collection of words, and ontology is the study of essence or being. In library science three of the four terms have related meanings. Metamodel.com provided the most useful online definitions I could find. They define a thesaurus as “a networked collection of related terms,” a taxonomy as “a collection of controlled vocabulary terms organized into a hierarchical structure,” and a controlled vocabulary as “a list of terms that have been enumerated explicitly.”

And now we come to ontology. Sadly, this is the second time I have critiqued a library science word -- I take no pleasure in this and hope it will be my last time -- but this is a particularly dreadful term that has almost no relation to the word’s natural meaning. I hope it will die a quick death, but it is now pandemic and will soon infect the dictionary. [Perhaps I should start the Library English Seminar and Survey Literacy Project (LESS LiP) to counter the ongoing threat.] For now, a lack of consensus over its meaning has kept it from standard usage. (Ironic, but telling, isn’t it?)

Into the midst of this chaos, Ying Ding has written her very informative paper to provide some clarity. She is a post-doctoral researcher at the Free University of Amsterdam (VU) a university of world renown and alma mater of my favorite living theologian, R.C. Sproul. (And speaking of theology: until now, the word ontology was confined almost exclusively to philosophical and theological writings.)

Within library science, there seems to be a lot of quibbling about what “ontologies” are. I think that “an ontology” is a semantic model that codifies a convention of vocabulary, semantics, and relations to enable an automated semantic search. It seems to be an ad hoc term that has everything to do with semantic search and nothing to do with anything else. Can’t we just call it a semantic search model? I’m just hoping we can stop repurposing words in a way that does violence to their etymology. Words are sacred things, really.