Applied ontology involves the practical application of ontological resources to specific domains, such as biomedicine or geography. Much work in applied ontology is carried out within the framework of the semantic web. See foundation ontology and ontology (computer science).
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Applying ontology to relationships
The challenge of applying ontology is ontology's emphasis on a world view orthogonal to epistemology. The emphasis is on being rather than on doing (as implied by "applied") or on knowing. This is explored by philosophers and pragmatists like Fernando Flores and Martin Heidegger
One way in which that emphasis plays out is in the concept of "speech acts": acts of promising, ordering, apologizing, requesting, inviting or sharing. The study of these acts from an ontological perspective is one of the driving forces behind relationship-oriented applied ontology. This can involve concepts championed by ordinary language philosophers like Wittgenstein.
Applying ontology can also involve looking at the relationship between a person's world and that person's actions. The context or clearing is highly influenced by the being of the subject or the field of being itself. This view is highly influenced by the philosophy of phenomenology, the works of Martin Heidegger, and others.
Ontological perspectives
Social scientists adopt one of a number of ontological approaches:
- Realism - the idea that facts are "out there" just waiting to be discovered;
- Empiricism - the idea that we can observe the world and evaluate those observations in relation to facts;
- Positivism - which focuses on the observations themselves, attentive more to claims about facts than to facts themselves;
- Grounded theory - which claims to derive theories from facts;
- Engaged theory - which moves across different levels of interpretation, linking different empirical questions to ontological understandings;
- Postmodernism - which regards facts as fluid and elusive, and recommends focusing only on observational claims.