In information science, an ontology is a formal, shared representation of the concepts in a domain and the relationships among them.
More than a glossary
An ontology defines classes such as FoodProduct, Producer, Territory or Observation; properties such as producedBy, locatedIn or supportedByEvidence; and constraints that state how those concepts may be used. The Web Ontology Language OWL 2, standardised by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), was designed so that ontologies can be developed, exchanged and processed by machines.
A glossary explains words, while an ontology makes some of their logical structure explicit. It is also not the same as a database schema: a schema organises storage, whereas an ontology can connect heterogeneous datasets, declare equivalences and exclusions, and support reasoning. Nor is it identical to a knowledge graph. The ontology supplies a conceptual and logical model; the graph contains entities and relations described through that model.
How is an ontology built?
Its scope and intended users must first be defined. Existing standards should be reused where appropriate. Concepts and relations must be documented, competency questions should test what the model needs to answer, and logical checks should detect contradictions. Versioning, provenance and governance are as important as syntax because categories can affect whose knowledge becomes visible.
For food systems, an ontology can connect products, species, processes, producers, territories, measurements, standards, legal claims and cultural knowledge without forcing them into one flat table. It can distinguish an unknown value from a measured zero, a claim from verified evidence, and a local term from a taxonomic identity.
What this means for Metraltus
For Metraltus, the ontology is an epistemic infrastructure: it states what the system is allowed to say, how evidence supports a statement and where uncertainty remains. Its quality must be evaluated technically and with domain communities. Formal consistency cannot replace participatory legitimacy, but it can make definitions, assumptions and consequences inspectable.
Leave a Reply