Ontology

Ontology in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Ontology in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Ontology may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. In philosophy, ontology refers to the study of existence, or the creation of a systematic account of existence. From this, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) took the term ontology to refer to an explicit formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them (FOLDOC 2002). From the AI field, ontology has become a new in word referring to thesauri and classifications: the hierarchical structuring of knowledge about things by subcategorising them according to their essential (or at least relevant and/or cognitive) qualities. … This is an extension of the previous senses of ontology (above) … (FOLDOC 2002). Ontologies are generally created for machine manipulation, whereas thesauri are generally designed for human use.