Innovation and Ontologies

138 Concept Formation
1.1.3 Modern Ontology
Nowadays, the discipline of Ontology is regarded as a special branch of metaphysics which deals
with nature, its essential properties, relations of beings and the organization of reality (Gandon,
2002a; Guarino & Giaretta, 1995; Smith, 2003).
Consequently, apart from natural 159 and social science, Ontology is the only discipline which deals
with real objects and the reality at hand. It is nearly impossible to draw a line between Ontology
and factual sciences (Bunge, 1977) and Ontology, while being a branch of philosophy, is an exact
science as well (Steimann & Nejdl, 1999).
A distinction is made between Special Ontology (or special metaphysics) and General Ontology (or general
metaphysics). Special Ontology deals with particular topic areas, e.g. biological or social fields. General
Ontology aims to answer questions like ‘what is being?’ or ‘what are the common features of all
beings?’ (Guarino & Giaretta, 1995).
The difficulties to find answers to ontological questions primarily lie in the problem of perception:
“[…] our perception of the reality is filtered by our perception organs, [thus] we cannot be
sure that the world is constituted as we experience it”. (Hesse, 2002)
Secondly, it is a particularity of ontological philosophy that
“[...] the answer must inevitably be given by linguistic methods […].” (Hesse, 2002)
Consequently, modern ontological approaches in analytical philosophy focus on the importance
of language and ontology capture is based on language analysis (Hesse, 2002).
1.2 Ontologies in Information Science
An ontology is a unifying framework for different viewpoints
and serves as the basis for enabling communication […]:
this […] conceptual framework is […] a lingua-franca. (Gandon, 2002b)
Research on information systems has been concerned with ontologies for nearly two decades.
The use of the plural term ontologies already indicates that to IS researchers, there is no more a
single ontology, no longer a statement about being made by such a philosophical concept. On the
contrary, ontologies have become engineering artifacts (Guarino & Giaretta, 1995), man-made and
concerned with problems of the theory of knowledge (Schuette & Zelewski, 2001).
Since ontologies are widely used for different purposes (e.g. natural language processing,
knowledge management, the Semantic Web etc.) and by diverse communities (e.g. knowledge
engineering or Artificial Intelligence), definitions of the term are nearly as numerous as there are
ontological initiatives. Besides, researchers in the field have repeatedly tried to settle the term 160 .
159 Natural sciences deal with the question, how something is. Ontology deals with the question of what is and what is not.
160 A comprehensive overview on a number of different definitions is given by Gómez-Pérez, Fernández-López & Corcho (2004).