I’ve been expecting this for ages, and finally it has happened.

Ontology.

Today I received my first works e-mail that uses the word:

Few devices share a common ontology today.

…and I expect more.

According to the dictionary, the word means: [dictionary.reference.com]

The branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being.

or:

1. <philosophy> A systematic account of Existence.

2. <artificial intelligence> (From philosophy) An explicit formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them.

For AI systems, what “exists” is that which can be represented. When the knowledge about a domain is represented in a declarative language, the set of objects that can be represented is called the universe of discourse. We can describe the ontology of a program by defining a set of representational terms. Definitions associate the names of entities in the universe of discourse (e.g. classes, relations, functions or other objects) with human-readable text describing what the names mean, and formal axioms that constrain the interpretation and well-formed use of these terms. Formally, an ontology is the statement of a logical theory.

A set of agents that share the same ontology will be able to communicate about a domain of discourse without necessarily operating on a globally shared theory. We say that an agent commits to an ontology if its observable actions are consistent with the definitions in the ontology. The idea of ontological commitment is based on the Knowledge-Level perspective.

3. <information science> The hierarchical structuring of knowledge about things by subcategorising them according to their essential (or at least relevant and/or cognitive) qualities. See subject index. This is an extension of the previous senses of “ontology” (above) which has become common in discussions about the difficulty of maintaining subject indices.

…but which has been hijacked by IT/Management/Process types to shock and awe we mundanes. I have been expecting Ontology to take-off for some time now, chiefly because of several dozen references to the word on [del.icio.us] — links to definitions, proselytization, and leaden essays that bore you to tears with their verbiage and plonking overanalysis.

eg: [users.bestweb.net]

No doubt they are useful in their field, but I dread the word’s assumption by the middle-managment classes. Equipped with definitions that include sexy buzzwords like formal, declarative, subcategorising, hierarchical – I do believe that ontology is just ripe to usurp patterns as the meme-du-jour.

So kids, remember you (probably) heard it here first, and when some suit tries to dazzle you with his ontology, that in the context it is being used, it is not actually that scary.

In my universe the goal of having an ontology is that your programs – tools, business processes, whatever – be equipped with a framework of rules and information, permitting a little common sense to be applied, thereby reducing effort.

It’s complex, and even burdensome, for computers to do this in a flexible way – just ask Doug Lenat [www.cyc.com] [www.austinchronicle.com] – and me, for the purposes of security management I prefer simple, well-tuned finite automata installed in a well-chosen battleground, over the vagiaries of a thinking machine.