Definition
In the mathematical geosciences the term ontology denotes an information artifact that specifies a set of terms, consisting of classes of objects, their relationships and properties, and semantic relationships between them. But even in the information and computing sciences, the word “ontology” can denote vastly different kinds of artifacts, see Fig. 1 and Table 1for examples. They differ in purpose and scope, ranging from informal conceptual ontologies to formal ontologies and from very broad to narrowly tailored to specific domains or specialized reasoning applications. They also differ in their representation formats, which vary in formality and expressivity, ranging from concept maps and term lists to structured thesauri and further to formal languages. If the semantics of terms are expressed in a formal, that is machine-interpretable, language one speaks of a “formal ontology.” Ontologies specified in less rigorous languages are referred to as conceptual ontologies or...
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Hahmann, T. (2021). Ontology. In: Daya Sagar, B., Cheng, Q., McKinley, J., Agterberg, F. (eds) Encyclopedia of Mathematical Geosciences. Encyclopedia of Earth Sciences Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26050-7_231-1
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