Ontology

Wikipedia's Definition:

Ontology is a study of conceptions of reality and the nature of being. In philosophy, ontology (from the Greek ὤν, genitive ὄντος: of being (part. of εἶναι: to be) and -λογία: science, study, theory) is the study of being or existence and forms the basic subject matter of metaphysics. It seeks to describe or posit the basic categories and relationships of being or existence to define entities and types of entities within its framework.

Its sister study, epistemology is a study of knowledge, including the search for answers to questions concerning how knowledge is acquired and maintained.

As a philosophical subject, ontology chiefly deals with the precise utilization of words as descriptors of entities or realities. Any ontology must give an account of which words refer to entities, which do not, why, and what categories result. When one applies this process to nouns such as electrons, energy, contract, happiness, time, truth, causality, and God, ontology becomes fundamental to many branches of philosophy.

But this is but a small part of the story .... for real men (and women) the Wikipedia offers this .. ontology in computer science

In both computer science and information science, an ontology is a data model that represents a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the objects within that domain.

Ontologies are used in artificial intelligence, the semantic web, software engineering, biomedical informatics and information architecture as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it. Ontologies generally describe:

* Individuals: the basic or "ground level" objects
* Classes: sets, collections, or types of objects
* Attributes: properties, features, characteristics, or parameters that objects can have and share
* Relations: ways that objects can be related to one another
* Events: the changing of attributes or relations

OK so there YOU have IT

and OH BY THE WAY ... Anything in ontology ... is for real-er men and women ....
I was just kiddin when talkin bout computers .... everybody knows that thats to make the geeks feel good .... wait a second ... they should be feeling good ... the richest man in the world is a geek ... and quite a few geeks are very rich ... so they don't really need special ego boosting .... (How's that for nonlinear logic?)

This is just too circular ...