Discover more from The Ontologist
You can tell ontologists early on. They’re the ones that spend time as kids reading dictionaries for fun. They don’t do so like ordinary kids, paging through the dictionary to find out how to spell a word for a spelling test or to get a definition for homework, furtively looking around to make sure they’re not seen by the other kids while they do so. No, the future ontologists sit in the corner for hours, reading one word after another - occasionally cross-referencing what they’re reading with other terms. They’re the ones who like diagramming sentences. (Understand, nobody likes diagramming sentences, but there they are.)
Taxonomists, linguists, and ontologists all start from the same larval form, though they differentiate as they age. Taxonomists tend to fixate on the meaning(s) that words have. They like to organize and categorize. Taxonomists usually become librarians because there is a close association between categorization systems and books. They also become curators and historians, trying to build up logical frameworks that describe the stories of given artifacts. They recognize that what they are creating is only an approximation - history is very malleable, after all - but their goal in life is making sense of the world through controlled narrative.
Linguists are fascinated with the nature and history of language itself. They are often multilingual themselves, but this is typically attributable to needing to understand how linguistic structures differ from one another. Many also study psychology as a window into understanding how we communicate. It can be argued that much of the interest in machine learning ultimately derives from the work of linguists using mathematics to model neural processes.
Ontologists, on the other hand, are fascinated by logical relationships and how concepts are connected with one another. Ontology comes from the Greek roots ontos- (thing) and logia (study), and can be thought of as the study of things. In general, ontologies are roughly analogous to languages, with meaning deriving from inferencing. The kid in the corner diagramming sentences was, more than likely, a budding ontologist. Programmatic ontologists often are language designers, and tend to be experts in languages such as regular expressions, Lisp, and BNF diagrams, and the bulk of their work usually involves data modeling.
A role-playing analogy is perhaps appropriate here. Let’s say that you want someone to run a role-playing game (your game master or GM). The taxonomist would be great in describing and categorizing characters, monsters, locations, treasures, and so forth, but things aren’t really connected.
The ontologist is great at describing the dungeon or town map, how things are connected to one another, and can even track what changes are made as the adventurers make their way through the world. However, accessing this information requires a specialized language, so someone generally has to translate what the ontologist is actually saying, making for a less-than-fun adventure. Moreover, the ontologist tends not to be as detailed as the taxonomist.
Finally, the linguist GM can tell a great story, but has a pretty poor memory, is somewhat unpredictable in how they will answer queries from the players, occasionally comes up with things that don’t make sense, and has a reputation for plagiarizing from other games without crediting his sources.
So who do you want running your game? As it turns out, you’re probably better off with a team effort here. The ontologist establishes rules that describe how information is structured, what kind of relationships exist, and the constraints that limit activities. The taxonomist can then use this information to identify the various entities that are actually in play (from elven archer princesses to mad undead wizard liches) and flesh them out (or strip the flesh off, in the case of the liches). Finally, the linguist becomes the storyteller, accessing information from the ontologist when the state changes to provide an exciting and consistent story.
Let the games begin.