Applied ontology involves the practical application of ontological resources to specific domains, such as biomedicine

Biomedicine

Biomedicine is a branch of medical science that applies biological and other natural-science principles to clinical practice,. Biomedicine, i.e. medical research, involves the study of physiological processes with methods from biology, chemistry and physics. Approaches range from understanding...

 or geography

Geography

Geography is the science that studies the lands, features, inhabitants, and phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or write about the Earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes...

. Much work in applied ontology is carried out within the framework of the semantic web

Semantic Web

The Semantic Web is a collaborative movement led by the World Wide Web Consortium that promotes common formats for data on the World Wide Web. By encouraging the inclusion of semantic content in web pages, the Semantic Web aims at converting the current web of unstructured documents into a "web of...

. See foundation ontology and ontology (computer science)

Ontology (computer science)

In computer science and information science, an ontology formally represents knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain and may be used to describe the domain.In theory, an ontology is...

.

Applying ontology to relationship

Interpersonal relationship

An interpersonal relationship is an association between two or more people that may range from fleeting to enduring. This association may be based on limerence, love, solidarity, regular business interactions, or some other type of social commitment. Interpersonal relationships are formed in the...

s

The challenge of applying ontology is ontology's emphasis on a world view

World view

A comprehensive world view is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the entirety of the individual or society's knowledge and point-of-view, including natural philosophy; fundamental, existential, and normative postulates; or themes, values, emotions, and...

 orthogonal to epistemology. The emphasis is on being rather than on doing (as implied by "applied

Applied science

Applied science is the application of scientific knowledge transferred into a physical environment. Examples include testing a theoretical model through the use of formal science or solving a practical problem through the use of natural science....

") or on knowing

Knowledge

Knowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...

.

One way in which that emphasis plays out is in the concept of "speech acts": acts of promising, ordering, apologizing, requesting, inviting or sharing. The study of these acts from an ontological perspective is one of the driving forces behind relationship-oriented applied ontology.
This can involve concepts championed by ordinary language philosophers like Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...

.

Applying ontology can also involve looking at the relationship between a person's world and that person's actions. The context or clearing is highly influenced by the being of the subject or the field of being

Category of being

In metaphysics , the different kinds or ways of being are called categories of being or simply categories. To investigate the categories of being is to determine the most fundamental and the broadest classes of entities...

 itself. This view is highly influenced by the philosophy of phenomenology, the works of Martin Heidegger, and many others.

Ontological perspectives

Social scientists adopt one of four main ontological approaches:

1. realism
   Scientific realism
   Scientific realism is, at the most general level, the view that the world described by science is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be...
   
    - the idea that facts are "out there" just waiting to be discovered
2. empiricism
   Empiricism
   Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...
   
    - the idea that we can observe the world and evaluate those observations in relation to facts
3. positivism
   Positivism
   Positivism is a a view of scientific methods and a philosophical approach, theory, or system based on the view that, in the social as well as natural sciences, sensory experiences and their logical and mathematical treatment are together the exclusive source of all worthwhile information....
   
    - which focuses on the observations themselves, attentive more to claims about facts than to facts themselves
4. postmodernism
   Postmodernism
   Postmodernism is a philosophical movement evolved in reaction to modernism, the tendency in contemporary culture to accept only objective truth and to be inherently suspicious towards a global cultural narrative or meta-narrative. Postmodernist thought is an intentional departure from the...
   
    - which regards facts as fluid and elusive, and recommends focusing only on observational claims.

See also

• Applied philosophy
• Martin Heidegger
  Martin Heidegger
  Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."...
  
  
• John Searle
  John Searle
  John Rogers Searle is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.-Biography:...
  
  
• Fernando Flores
  Fernando Flores
  Carlos Fernando Flores Labra is a Chilean engineer, entrepreneur and politician. He is a former cabinet minister of president Salvador Allende and was senator for the Arica and Parinacota and Tarapacá regions between 2001 and 2009...
  
  
• Bertrand Russell
  Bertrand Russell
  Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
  
  
• Richard Rorty
  Richard Rorty
  Richard McKay Rorty was an American philosopher. He had a long and diverse academic career, including positions as Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton, Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University...
  
  
• Landmark Education
  Landmark Education
  Landmark Education LLC is a personal training and development company which offers educational programs in approximately 115 locations in more than 20 countries worldwide....
  
  
• Ken Wilbur
• Barry Smith (ontologist)
  Barry Smith
  Barry Smith may refer to:*Barry Smith , ontologist at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York*Barry Smith , preacher from New Zealand...
  
   - ontologist with a focus on biomedicine
• Nicola Guarino
  Nicola Guarino
  Nicola Guarino is a researcher in the area of Formal Ontology for Information Systems, and the head of the Laboratory for Applied Ontology , part of the Italian National Research Council in Trento.- History :...
  
  , researcher in the formal ontology of information systems

External references

• Applied Ontology (journal), abstracted in the ACM Guide to Computing Literature
  ACM Guide to Computing Literature
  ACM Guide to Computing Literature is a database, published by the Association for Computing Machinery , that categorizes and abstracts most computer science literature. It contains citations to all ACM publications, as well as literature from other publishers.The Guide was also published in print...
  
  
• Formal Ontology in Information Systems (interdisciplinary conference on Applied Ontology)
• International Association for Ontology and its Applications, focusing on "the applications of ontological analysis to conceptual modeling, knowledge engineering, knowledge management, information-systems development, library and information science, scientific research, and semantic technologies in general"
• Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA) ISTC-CNR, researching "the use of ontologies for e-government, enterprise modeling and integration, natural language processing, and the Semantic Web"
• National Center for Ontological Research, covering "applications in fields such as ontology of the sciences, spatial and cognitive ontology, terminological systems, enterprise ontology and in a variety of defense- and homeland security-related projects"
• European Center for Ontological Research, "applying ontology to a variety of problems in information science and related areas"
• Ontology applied to geography
• Ontology applied to biomedicine
• Process Specification Language
  Process Specification Language
  The Process Specification Language is a set of logic terms used to describe processes. The logic terms are specified in an ontology that provides a formal description of the components and their relationships that make up a process...
  
  , ontology applied to process in manufacturing, engineering, and business operations
• "Introduction to Applied Ontology: The Philosophical Analysis of Everyday Objects" - featuring ontology defined as the "study of categories" of sociological objects