Ontology

An ontology, according to one famous definition from 1992, is the "specification of a conceptualization" - an abstract, simplified view of the world represented for purposes ranging from knowledge sharing to decision-making. While ontologies are commonly assumed to be semantically complex, with rich sets of relationships between its concepts and axioms designed to support sophisticated inferencing, there is no inherent limit to how simple an ontology may be. Indeed, the key ontologies of the Finto, the Finnish thesaurus and ontology service, are actually SKOS concept schemes, and the Dublin Core™ vocabulary itself is sometimes referred to as an ontology.