What is an ontology?
In this section, we’ll learn about ontologies and how they can be represented and stored as networks. While this chapter focuses on linguistic ontologies, many other types of ontologies exist, including gene ontologies, briefly reviewed to motivate this section.
Introduction to ontologies
As mentioned in the chapter introduction, an ontology is a set of ideas that are related by some property. Generally, they are used to organize knowledge within a specific discipline. Let’s make this a little bit more concrete with an example. Because examples in genetics are more widely used in ontology study, we’ll build up the intuition with a biological example before tackling linguistics.
Say we have five genes that are within a regulatory pathway that controls the production of enzymes or polypeptides found in an animal’s venom. Often, environmental conditions and geography play a role in the ratio of active compounds found in venom,...
