Ontology

 Artificial intelligence poses more insistently than ever the question concerning which categories we use in order to make relevant searches in a huge material. The introduction of consistent categories is a necessity in order to use in full the technical capacities of artificial intelligence to arrive at a deep understanding of phenomena, an understanding built mostly on correlations, and to make predictions based on this understanding.

To answer specific questions through an AI project, both a very specialised programming is necessary in order to take into account the categories of the project, and a system of pre-formulated categories, that is an ontology. This is a much more complex ensemble of tasks than what is usually believed. 

The categories of an ontology might or might not coincide with the conventional knowledge in a domain: as Lev Manovich has shown in Cultural analytics, some of art history's accepted truths turn out to be dubious when tested on an extensive material. The same would certainly apply to law, probably a little less to medicine.

The long-term goal of the present site is to present essays, both from the point of view of formulation of the content of categories in ontologies, and from the point of view of their technical application, and to publish the results of specific ontology projects

 As has been stated by e.g. Nicola Guarino, the technical and the content level are closely related. The present project aims at taking this into account.

Key words: ontology, Lev Manovich, categories, concepts, ontology of the humanities,  ontology of ideology, prediction, predictive analytics, Nicola Guarino