Multimedia ontology: Representation and applications

Ontology is a holistic study of the nature of being, becoming, existence in past, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. The subject ontology classically belongs to the broad discipline of philosophy also known as metaphysics. It deals with questions concerning what entities exist or may be said to exist, and how such entities may be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and categorized in accordance with similarities and dissimilarities. As a branch of philosophy, the basic approach of ontology is theoretical. However, it also has practical applications in various subjects such as information science and technology, basic sciences, and logic. Ontology has different connotations in computer science and information science. Ontology is a formal naming and definition of the types, properties, and interrelationships of the entities that fundamentally exist in a particular subject domain. Another concept that precedes ontology is taxonomy, which is the basic science of classification of objects and entities. The fields of artificial intelligence, neural networking, the semantic web, systems engineering, software engineering, biomedical informatics, library science, enterprise bookmarking, and information architecture create ontologies to limit complexity and to organize information.