When I tell people that I work in a philosophy department and mention my interest in applied ontology, I’m often met with two questions: “What is applied ontology?” followed by “What is the link with philosophy?” This post aims to answer these questions and explore how philosophical thinking continues to solve practical problems in our technological world.
What are the connections between applied ontology and philosophy?
Ontology, in its traditional philosophical sense, is the study of being: it examines what all entities have in common and how they can be classified into fundamental categories. However, in contemporary contexts, ontology has evolved beyond its purely philosophical roots. While maintaining connections with its philosophical heritage, modern ontology has found practical applications in various fields, particularly in computer science. In this context, applied ontology has become a discipline in its own right, focused on developing ontologies: formal, machine-readable representations of knowledge domains that define entities, their properties, and the relationships between them.
How did the idea of applying ontology to the industrial sector emerge?
Applied ontology started developing in the 1970s, in response to compatibility issues that industries faced when sharing data. This data was stored in different information systems, each using its own terminology and categorization principles, making exchanges difficult. This new Tower of Babel led to the rise of applied ontology, which aims to create a common foundation for communication between these information systems — a kind of Esperanto for databases.
What value can ontology bring in this context?
Applied ontology significantly improves productivity by enabling interoperability between systems as well as facilitating data reuse and process automation. For example, imagine different departments of a pharmaceutical company, each using its own system to manage information about medications: the research department focuses on molecules and their properties, production on formulations and processes, regulation on approval documents, marketing on therapeutic indications, etc. With a common ontology of pharmaceutical products, all this data becomes interoperable. And what applies to one company also applies to an entire industry — or even to all human knowledge.
What types of problems can businesses submit to ontologists?
Ontologists are employed to create and deploy ontologies to solve data integration problems. After a merger or acquisition, a company may need to make heterogeneous information systems compatible and employ ontologists for this purpose. Another application is the development of an internal search engine for the company, where ontology would improve the relevance of results by establishing semantic relationships between terms used in different departments and documents.
There are numerous examples of companies working with ontologists, including those with philosophical training. For instance, AstraZeneca uses ontologies to organize and connect complex biomedical data — such as proteins, genes, and diseases — to accelerate drug development and help researchers verify their hypotheses.
And where does SCOR fit into all this?
We are currently developing various partnerships that should lead to collaborations in the near future. For example, as part of a research project submitted at the end of March aimed at using ontologies to limit hallucinations in generative AI models, we have contacted several media organizations in French-speaking Switzerland with whom we plan to work. Additionally, the Institute of Philosophy, in partnership with SCOR, will offer a course in applied ontologies next semester open to students of both humanities and data science, creating a pool of interdisciplinary skills.