Words and Ontologies
All of my life I have been very invested in finding the right words to describe things. I wanted to know the official name of an object, and any other word that people often use to describe it, how specific or how general. I want to know that object completely, to describe it thoroughly and to know how it is used - even in different regional dialects and languages.
For example, here is an image of me holding a ball.
It is an orange ball. It has black stripes and little grippy bits across the whole surface. People call it a basketball. We can use it to play a game by the same name. We should dribble the basketball when we walk to move it across the court. It is different than a soccer ball or a baseball, but they are all balls.
I'm sure that I have driven the folks around me bonkers on more than one occasion with these ponderings. But occasionally I run into someone else who "gets it."
Do you think this way, too?
Let me tell you about a word that will rock your world.
That word is...
Ontology.
On-tol-o-gy
Say that silly big word with me: Awwn-tall-oh-gee.
Ooh, gee, what's an ontology?
It's the metaphysical concept of what exists, the basics of what something is and how it relates to others.
In science we develop and apply ontologies to data. Ontologies help data to be interoperable and scientific studies to be repeatable. They're more than a common language. They explain relationships, too.
Learn more about how ontologies are used by the life science community here:
#ontology
#words
#description
#science
#metaphysics
#ball
#linguistics
#Programming
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