Defintion of Ontology

From Marketing Ontology

A key aspect of defining and developing a marketing ontology is to understand what is "ontology"? There are two Wikipedia definitions for "ontology":

1. A philosophical definition: ontology (from the Greek ὄν, genitive ὄντος: of being (part. of εἶναι: to be) and -λογία: science, study, theory) is the most fundamental branch of metaphysics. It studies being or existence and their basic categories and relationships, to determine what entities and what types of entities exist. Ontology thus has strong implications for conceptions of reality. See further description and discussion in the ontology Wikipedia entry.

2.A Computer Science definition: ontology is a data model that represents a domain and is used to reason about the objects in that domain and the relations between them. Ontologies are used in artificial intelligence, the semantic web, and software engineering as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it. Ontologies generally consist of:

• Individuals: the basic or "ground level" objects
• Classes: sets, collections, or types of objects[1]
• Attributes: properties, features, characteristics, or parameters that objects can have and share
• Relations: ways that objects can be related to one another

See further discussion and discussion on the ontology (computer science) Wikipedia entry I think that both definitions of ontology are relevant to the Marketing Ontology Project. There is room for a philosophy strand exploring “of being marketing”. However, developing marketing ontology that can be used by computers either in an artificial intelligence or semantic web context is also relevant to the Marketing Ontology Project. I would appreciate discussion on how we should develop Marketing Ontology and of course if you have developed own Marketing Ontologies already, then please tell us about them and share them with us.