i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

October 6, 2010

An ontology defines the concepts and terms used to describe and represent an area of knowledge and the relationships among them.  A dictionary can be considered a simplistic ontology, and a thesaurus a slightly more rigorous one, but we usually reserve "ontology" for meaning expressed using more formal or structured language.  Put another way, an ontology relies on a controlled vocabulary for describing the relationships among concepts and terms.