How does ontology relate to computer science?
1 Badly. "Ontology" as a philosophical discipline is "the study of what is", in particular how objects are categorized and how they relate to each other. It's different from "epistemology" (the study of how you know what is in the world to begin with") and "metaphysics" (a really broad term which includes not just ontology but pretty much every thing outside of the plain operations of the physical world.)Ontology started with the ancient Greeks and was still a discipline, albeit a somewhat overlooked one, for a long time.
Most philosophers passed it over in favor of broader metaphysical topics like "causality". It was still out there (it's hard to do anything without some ontology), but Aristotle pretty much had the last word for a long time and the rest was commentary. A couple of decades ago computer scientists in the field of "knowledge representation" discovered it.
In theory, it had a strong bearing on what they did. Ontology used logic to create models of what's out in the world. Computers are good at manipulating logic, but you need some kind of model to make the manipulations worth it.
("Garbage in, garbage out". )I'm afraid from there it got to be kind of a muddle. The lessons that the philosophers of ontology had to teach got lost, and "ontology" became more or less a buzzword meaning "whatever I was doing with knowledge representation before".
These days it refers primarily to a project called the Semantic Web by Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the actual web. It's primarily a way of taking a very, very, very limited kind of ontology (taxonomies) and applying a rather limited brand of logic (description logic) then coding it up in a language called XML (which combines the readability of LISP with the conciseness of Pilgrim's Progress).
2 PamPerdue touched a bit on ontology as it relates to the field of knowledge representation. To elaborate a bit, it is the classification of information that provides the ability to identify relationships between components. Further, the way that items are classified (ontology) has a very strong bearing on the usefulness of those items in a broader system.
For this reason computer scientists, software engineers in particular, concern themselves with how they classify items, and more importantly the relationship between items, as that will have a direct impact on their usefulness within a system .
Badly."Ontology" as a philosophical discipline is "the study of what is", in particular how objects are categorized and how they relate to each other. It's different from "epistemology" (the study of how you know what is in the world to begin with") and "metaphysics" (a really broad term which includes not just ontology but pretty much every thing outside of the plain operations of the physical world.)Ontology started with the ancient Greeks and was still a discipline, albeit a somewhat overlooked one, for a long time. Most philosophers passed it over in favor of broader metaphysical topics like "causality".
It was still out there (it's hard to do anything without some ontology), but Aristotle pretty much had the last word for a long time and the rest was commentary. A couple of decades ago computer scientists in the field of "knowledge representation" discovered it. In theory, it had a strong bearing on what they did.
Ontology used logic to create models of what's out in the world. Computers are good at manipulating logic, but you need some kind of model to make the manipulations worth it. ("Garbage in, garbage out".)I'm afraid from there it got to be kind of a muddle.
The lessons that the philosophers of ontology had to teach got lost, and "ontology" became more or less a buzzword meaning "whatever I was doing with knowledge representation before". These days it refers primarily to a project called the Semantic Web by Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the actual web. It's primarily a way of taking a very, very, very limited kind of ontology (taxonomies) and applying a rather limited brand of logic (description logic) then coding it up in a language called XML (which combines the readability of LISP with the conciseness of Pilgrim's Progress).
I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.