I see most work like you describe about ontology as more extra abstractions to reason about ontologies on top of the basic thing that ontologies are.
So what is ontology fundamentally? Simply the categorization of the world, telling apart one thing from another. Something as simple as a sensor that flips the voltage on an output wire high or low based on whether there’s more than X lumens of light hitting the sensor is creating an ontology by establishing a relationship between the voltage on the output wire and the environment surrounding the sensor.
Given ontology can be a pretty simple thing, I don’t know if folks are confused about ontology so much as perhaps sometimes confused about how complex an ontology they can claim a system has.
I see most work like you describe about ontology as more extra abstractions to reason about ontologies on top of the basic thing that ontologies are.
So what is ontology fundamentally? Simply the categorization of the world, telling apart one thing from another. Something as simple as a sensor that flips the voltage on an output wire high or low based on whether there’s more than X lumens of light hitting the sensor is creating an ontology by establishing a relationship between the voltage on the output wire and the environment surrounding the sensor.
Given ontology can be a pretty simple thing, I don’t know if folks are confused about ontology so much as perhaps sometimes confused about how complex an ontology they can claim a system has.