Ontology was originally reserved as a philosophical exercise dealing with categorization, analysis, and inter-relationships.  Ontology is now a rapidly evolving science in response to increasing complex information systems and/or “big data”.

Specific to the built-environment life-cycle management BLM / BIM, ontology is a fundamental requirement as it’s needed to establish robust, coherent, and consistent representations of ever-changing information.  This information comes from a variety of competencies, processes, and technologies and must be aggregated and harmonized to enabling enhanced decision-support mechanisms and overall improvement in resources allocation.

“Formal ontology now spans conceptual modeling, database design, software engineering, organizational modeling, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, the life sciences, bioinformatics, geographic  information science, knowledge engineering, information retrieval, and  the semantic web.”

 

Common methods support comparable outputs!