adaptive path » blog
The best example of this is “ontology.” I finally understand what those database folks mean when they say it. Ontologies aren’t synonyms for taxonomies — they work together. Ontologies are the rule sets — they set up the structure of how things are related to each other. They take the “related terms” of a thesaurus and completely blow it out of the water with the complexity and depth of relationships that are possible. With an ontology you set up how concepts and information relate together, and then use that as a blueprint to build out the instances, or what I would call the taxonomy or thesaurus.

But the ontologies go one step further than just being glorified vocabulary maintenance tools. Because of their close relationship to data modeling and database content, they allow connections, learnings, and inferences to become clear. And they, along with some other technology that I don’t fully understand yet, make those connections happen. I’ve said for years that building a thesaurus will help improve the results in your enterprise search system, or that you can relate terms in your thesaurus together to auto-populate related content or highlight cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. But I now see that this was only one part of the solution. The semantic relationships within the ontology are what enable the computer build out those connections. It’s the magic fairy dust that makes this stuff happen. And oh boy is that cool!