Draft. This entry is an unreviewed draft. Its sources have not been checked by a named person and no domain reviewer has approved it. Treat every claim as provisional.
An account of entities in a domain and the relationships among them. Formal ontologies make selected commitments explicit for computational use.
- Scope note
- Philosophical and computational meanings overlap but are not interchangeable.
- Synonyms
- None recorded as true synonyms in this context.
- Monograph
- Ontology (draft)
- External mappings
- None recorded. In W0 no mapping to SNOMED CT or any external authority is asserted for this entry. A future mapping record will carry source system, identifier, version, relation type, evidence, author, confidence where meaningful, and review state.
- Formal status
- Editorial entry only. It is not part of any released ontology and a prose edit here changes no formal definition.
Notes
In philosophy, ontology is the study of what exists and of the categories under which things fall: substance and property, class and individual, process and state. In informatics, an ontology is an artifact: a set of classes, properties, and axioms written in a formal language such as OWL (Web Ontology Language) so that software can check consistency and derive consequences. The two uses share a concern with categories and their relations but differ in purpose. A philosopher asks what the world contains; an informatician decides what a system will commit to representing, and records only that.
For a physician or radiochemist the practical point is that an ontology states what kinds of things are being talked about (a radionuclide is not a radiopharmaceutical; a target is not its expression) and how those kinds relate. A list of names is not an ontology, and neither is a hierarchy without stated relationship types. The monograph develops the distinction and works through a synthetic nuclear medicine example.