Ontology#

In the 1999 movie The Matrix, Keanu Reeves’ character is having a rough day. He needs to master every martial art in just a few hours. But he’s in luck. In the future, humans can download knowledge from computers directly into their brains. After a few swift clicks, Keanu turns towards the camera and dramatically says, “I know Kung Fu!”.

Keanu was saved because someone had encoded all the world’s knowledge about Kung Fu into a meaningful language that machines and humans can understand. That’s an ontology. Put another way, an ontology is a formal representation of knowledge, expressed as a conceptual network that conveys meaning in a way that both humans and machines can process.

Far from being a far-out science fiction concept, ontologies form the backbone of many tools we use every day. They are foundational to the modern World Wide Web, social media networks, and media streaming platforms. Ontologies are immensely powerful tools for sharing knowledge, linking resources, and assigning meaning to data.

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