About SCOR
The Swiss Center for Ontological Research (SCOR) aims to support research projects and industrial applications relevant to ontology in Switzerland (and beyond). It was launched in 2025 by members of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Neuchâtel.
The mission of SCOR is to serve as a hub, linking people and institutions working in the field of ontology and to create fruitful collaborations and networks across the Swiss scientific community and relevant stakeholders, so that Switzerland will be an exemplary model for other countries in terms of ontology research and applications that will foster innovation and drive paradigm shifts.
What is Ontology?
The term “ontology” is originally used in philosophy to refer to a study of existence and what exists in the world. But it is nowadays used in information science to refer, roughly, to a well-specified representation of (the knowledge of) a particular domain (e.g., biomedicine) that is written in some formal language. Philosophical ontology and ontologies in information science are sometimes contrastively described as “Ontology” and “ontologies”, respectively. Interestingly enough, there is an intimate connection between these two kinds of ontologies: theories and insights from philosophical ontology can contribute to the development of ontologies in information science.
Ontologies are today widely used to facilitate the semantic integration of data and information that are all too often dispersed in different (parts of) information systems, such as databases. To put it differently, ontologies can serve as an effective tool to tackle the problem of the lack of semantic interoperability, as they are machine-readable and their consistency can be automatically checked. Against this background, there emerges a burgeoning interdisciplinary field called “applied ontology” that lies at the intersection of philosophy, information science, logic, linguistics, artificial intelligence and many other domains of inquiry.
There are presently several ontology-editing softwares available. For instance, the open-source ontology editor Protégé was created by a group of people at Standard University and it helps us to develop ontologies e.g. in the Web Ontology Language (OWL).