Ontology: Advancing Flawless Library Services

Ontology

The word ontology, likewise to the term concept, has been characterized from many distinctly separate points of view and with different levels of formalities. Ontologies can be held as intercessors in the presentation to the mind in the form of an idea or image or knowledge by means of conceptions. Hence, ontologies occupy a certain position between conceptions (which they include) on one hand and on the other it includes as part of something broader knowledge domain.

“Ontology” has respective meanings, but the following two are the most wide-eyed primary definitions pertinent to information studies:

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  “Ontology is an area of philosophy that to some extent, depending on the orientation of the philosopher, questions and/or provides an outline for being, entities, and reality in general and relationships within and between the three”; (Ghani and Rahim, 2012) and

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  “Ontology is the name given to a type of powerfully structured digital information system (computational ontologies) representing entities, universals, classes, and relationships; most often a computational ontology is constructed for a particular knowledge domain”. (Kurilovas et al., 2014).

A more adept interpretation of what “ontology” is, implies in the diversity of contexts in which it is practiced could be implemental for learners, instructors, and scholars in LIS in a number of potential manners:

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  Able to just communicate them of what the term represents in its diversity of contexts of use;

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  Assist them to depict their own decisions about what the term signifies in its mixture of contexts;

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  Help instructors better explicate what ontology stands for in its sort of contexts including the growth of computational ontologies; and

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  It gives system developers to develop a system with a nuance understanding of the strengths and disadvantages that cause computational ontology.

Ontology library schemata extend functions for handling, accommodating and standardizing groups of ontologies, for categorization of content with ontologies, and for applying ontologies in applications.