Ontologiset

Ontologiset is Finnish an adjective derived from ontologia, meaning ontology. It describes things related to ontology, the study of the nature of being and the structure of reality, or more broadly, the conceptualization and categorization of entities within a given domain.

In philosophy, ontology is a branch of metaphysics that investigates what exists and how entities are related. Ontological questions address the kinds of things that exist, what it means for something to be, and how entities are grouped into categories such as objects, properties, and events. Central debates involve universals versus particulars, the status of abstract entities, and the nature of necessity and possibility.

In information science and computer science, ontologies are explicit, formal specifications of a shared conceptualization of a domain. An ontology defines classes (concepts), relations (properties), and instances, along with axioms and constraints. Ontologies are encoded in languages such as OWL, RDF Schema, or description logics, and are used to enable semantic interoperability, knowledge graphs, data integration, reasoning, and natural language processing. Examples include the FOAF ontology for people and schema.org for web metadata.

The term ontologiset is used to describe properties or discussions within this domain, such as ontologiset kysymykset (ontological questions) or ontologiset oletukset (ontological assumptions), depending on the context.

A related distinction is with epistemology, where ontology concerns what exists and how it is, while epistemology concerns knowledge, justification, and the limits of what can be known.