Ontologies in the Behavioral Sciences: Accelerating Research and the Spread of Knowledge Digest Version (2022) / Chapter Skim
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2 What Are Ontologies?
2 What Are Ontologies?
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Scientists today use the word ontology to refer to efforts to organize knowledge in particular domains. Although there is no universal definition of a scientific ontology, a valuable working definition is an explicit, formal specification of a shared conceptualization -- a systematic set of shared terms and an explication of their interrelationships.1 As a simple example, an ontology might define and categorize types of ice cream products, distinguishing among those served in vessels, in cones, and on sticks, as shown in Figure 2-1.
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Also during the 10th century, scholars in China produced a massive compendium of knowledge, the Taiping Yulan, which organized knowledge under 5000 headings across 55 categories. More modern examples emerged during the Enlightenment: for example, Denis Diderot proposed the Encyclopédie, co-written with Jean le Rond d'Alembert and originally published between 1751 and 1772, as a means to fundamentally change how humans think and what humans know.
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https://archives.newyorker.com/newyorker/1986-08-04/flipbook/CV1/ Figure 2-2 illustrates the spectrum of semantic specification used in the context of the behavioral sciences, showing where controlled lists, thesauri, loose hierarchies, and taxonomies fall. Controlled lists, such as a list of social and behavioral determinants of health, are enumerations of specifically defined terms that help to provide consistency for users of the list.
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The controlled vocabulary allows for indexing, cataloging, and searching of psychological concepts. Diagnostic and A loose hierarchy of the behavioral phenotypic manifestation of Statistical Manual mental disorders using a common language and standard criteria of Mental Disorders based on consensus.
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Considering this variety and the importance of designing classification structures to suit the needs of the researchers in a particular domain, the committee found that it was not useful to try discern a strict cutoff below which a structure would not be considered an ontology or to classify known structures as ontologies or "non-ontologies." Instead, we highlight that the structures that exist along this continuum in the behavioral sciences serve ontological purposes that are scientifically valuable. These examples are discussed in more detail below.
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