Ontology

Ontology is the study of being and existence, including what kinds of things exist and how they are related. It also names formal systems that specify the entities and relations in a domain.

Being: Being is the most general condition or fact of existence. Ontology asks what it means for anything to be.
Existential quantification: Existential quantification is the logical operation expressed by phrases such as “there exists.” Quine’s criterion connects ontological commitment to the entities a theory quantifies over.
Parmenides: Parmenides was a Presocratic Greek philosopher whose poem argues that what-is is ungenerated and imperishable. His arguments made being, change, and nonbeing foundational philosophical problems.
Nominalism: Nominalism denies that universals exist independently of the particular things or names associated with them. It rejects one prominent answer to what shared properties are.
Formal ontology: Formal ontology is the explicit specification of entities, categories, and relations in a domain. It turns questions about kinds of things into structured, machine-usable representations.
Existence: Existence is the condition of being real or instantiated. Debates about what exists form ontology’s central questions.
Ontological commitment: Ontological commitment is the set of entities a theory must assume exist to be true. It makes theories answerable for the things their claims require.
Plato: Plato was an ancient Greek philosopher who developed accounts of Forms and their relation to sensible things. His Forms offer a landmark account of what kinds of entities are most real.
Realism: Realism is the view that at least some entities exist independently of our thoughts or language. It contrasts with views that treat disputed entities as projections or linguistic constructions.
Ontology (information science): An ontology in information science is a formal representation of concepts and relations within a domain. This technical use adapts ontological classification for data integration and knowledge representation.

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