lisa colvin — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:47:16 GMT

The use of of the word “ontology” to describe the creation of knowledge domains actually pre-dated the W3C. It was actively used in the AI field in the 80s (and probably earlier) for people active in designing expert systems., which involves more than controlled vocabularies. In creating models, one is also creating theories about how the models will be designed (for example, describing how spatial and temporal concepts shall be represented). Many people active in ontology work for the past three decades have backgrounds in philosophy and mathematical logic. Some philosophers disdain “applied ontology” work, but it seems like a reasonable extension. The epistomological aspects are part of the knowledge elicitation processes within ontological engineering, so it’s all related. :)

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by lisa colvin