Everything about Ontology
Philosophical study of being
Ontology is the philosophical study of being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of reality and every entity within it. To articulate the basic structure of being, ontology examines the shared characteristics among all things and investigates their classification into basic types, such as the categories of particulars and universals. Particulars are unique, non-repeatable entities, such as the person Socrates, whereas universals are general, repeatable entities, like the color green. Another distinction exists between concrete objects existing in space and time, such as a tree, and abstract objects existing outside space and time, like the number 5. Systems of categories aim to provide a comprehensive inventory of reality by employing categories such as substance, property, relation, state of affairs, and event. Wikipedia →
🧭 Start here: a 6-step reading path
- Read the overview: OntologyA 5-minute orientation
- Skim a recent paper: The Gene Ontology knowledgebase in 2023Influential work since 2022
- Pick up a classic book: Sein und ZeitThe most-reprinted book on the subject
- Read the landmark paper: Gene Ontology: tool for the unification of biologyCited 38,360 times
- Go sideways: ExistenceA closely related topic
- Go sideways: MetaphysicsA closely related topic
📖 Definitions
Noun The branch of metaphysics that addresses the nature or essential characteristics of being and of things that exist; the study of being qua being.
Noun In a subject view, or a world view, the set of conceptual or material things or classes of things that are recognised as existing, or are assumed to exist in context, and their interrelations; in a body of theory, the ontology comprises the domain of discourse, the things that are defined as existing, together with whatever emerges from their mutual implications.
Noun The theory of a particular philosopher or school of thought concerning the fundamental types of entity in the universe.
Noun A logical system involving theory of classes, developed by Stanislaw Lesniewski (1886-1939).
🗂️ The subject at a glance
🏆 Landmark papers (most cited)
Gene Ontology: tool for the unification of biology
A translation approach to portable ontology specifications
Gene ontology analysis for RNA-seq: accounting for selection bias
REVIGO Summarizes and Visualizes Long Lists of Gene Ontology Terms
ClueGO: a Cytoscape plug-in to decipher functionally grouped gene ontology and pathway annotation networks
The Gene Ontology Resource: 20 years and still GOing strong
BiNGO: a Cytoscape plugin to assess overrepresentation of Gene Ontology categories in Biological Networks
The Gene Ontology resource: enriching a GOld mine
🆕 Influential since 2022
The Gene Ontology knowledgebase in 2023
The Human Phenotype Ontology in 2024: phenotypes around the world
The Gene Ontology knowledgebase in 2026
Decolonizing energy justice from the ground up: Political ecology, ontology, and energy landscapes
LOT: An industrial oriented ontology engineering framework
📚 Books worth reading
Sein und ZeitMartin Heidegger · 1927
L'être et le néantJean-Paul Sartre · 1943
Meditationes de prima philosophiaRené Descartes · 1642
Wissenschaft der LogikGeorg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel · 1812
De ente et essentiaThomas Aquinas, de Freiberg Dietrich · 1480
Introduction to metaphysicsMartin Heidegger, Gregory Fried · 1953
Swords in the MistFritz Leiber · 1968
Gift from the seaAnne Morrow Lindbergh · 1955
Ranked by number of editions on Open Library, a rough measure of how lasting a book is.
🔗 Related topics
- Existence Existence is the state of having being or reality in contrast to nonexistence and nonbeing. Existence is often contrasted with essence: the essence of…
- Metaphysics Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the basic nature or most fundamental structure of reality. It is traditionally seen as the study…
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