Applied ontology involves the practical application of ontological concepts. This can be exceedingly difficult as ontology is a fairly abstract study. There are two main focuses of applied ontology:

• Ontology applied to computer networks, the semantic web and the like. This is the most common application of ontological concepts. See foundation ontology and ontology (computer science)
• Ontology applied to human relationships and being. This article focuses on this aspect of applied ontology.

Applying ontology

The challenge of applying ontology is its emphasis on a world view orthogonal to epistemology. The emphasis is on being rather than doing or knowing.

One way 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 applied ontology.^[1] 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^[2], the works of Martin Heidegger, and many others.^[3]

Ontological perspectives

Social scientists adopt one of four main 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; and
• postmodernism - which holds that facts are fluid and elusive, so that we should focus only on our observational claims.

See also

• Applied philosophy
• Heidegger
• John Searle
• Fernando Flores
• Bertrand Russell
• Richard Rorty
• Landmark Education
• Ken Wilbur

References

External References

• Applied Ontology (journal)
• Formal Ontology in Information Systems (interdisciplinary conference on Applied Ontology)
• ISTC-CNR Laboratory for Applied Ontology
• National Center for Ontological Research
• European Center for Ontological Research
• Ontology Applied to Geography
• "Introduction to Applied Ontology: The Philosophical Analysis of Everyday Objects"

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