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Formal Ontology - books

Jul 17, 20255 min read

Excellent question. Based on your critique of Kerr’s work, you are absolutely on the right track. The field you’re looking for is indeed ontology, but specifically as it’s understood in information science, computer science, and knowledge management, rather than its more abstract, purely philosophical parent.

It’s a powerful and fascinating field that provides the formal tools to address precisely the problems you’ve identified: ambiguity, poor labelling, and unstructured knowledge.

Here is a guide to what this field entails and some reading suggestions to help you explore it.

Understanding Applied Ontology

First, it’s helpful to distinguish between the two main senses of the word:

  1. Philosophical Ontology (Metaphysics): This is the traditional branch of philosophy concerned with the fundamental nature of being, existence, and reality itself. It asks questions like “What does it mean to exist?”

  2. Applied or Formal Ontology (Information Science): This is the field relevant to your interests. It involves creating a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualisation. In simpler terms, it’s the practice of defining the concepts and relationships used to describe and represent an area of knowledge.

An ontology in this practical sense provides a shared vocabulary and a structural framework that prevents the exact kind of confusion you noted with terms like “triangle” 111and “differentiation of self”2.

Why Ontology Would Appeal to You

Given your passion for knowledge organisation and pedagogy, ontology offers a systematic way to:

  • Enforce Clarity: It forces you to define what you mean by a term. Is a “triangle” a stable three-person relationship or the process of bringing a child into parental anxiety? An ontology would not allow one term to mean two different things333333333.

  • Establish Relationships: It formally defines how concepts relate to one another. You could specify that “triangulation” is a type of “emotional pattern,” and that it involves a “dyad” and a “third party.” This builds the kind of “meta-diagrams” you felt were missing4.

  • Improve Learning (Pedagogy): A well-defined ontology provides a clear map of a knowledge domain. This structure is invaluable for teaching, as it ensures that terms are introduced logically and defined before they are used—avoiding the issue you noted where “fusion” was used for 60 pages before being defined5.

Reading & Learning Pathway

Here are some suggestions, starting with more accessible concepts and moving toward more formal resources.

Level 1: Accessible Introductions to Knowledge Organisation

These books aren’t strictly about ontology but are the best entry point for understanding the problems that ontology solves. They focus on the practical organisation of information.

  • “The Organised Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload” by Daniel J. Levitin: A fantastic, science-backed look at how our brains organise information and how we can apply those principles to the external world. It will resonate with your critique of unclear mental models.

  • “Information Architecture: For the Web and Beyond” by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge Arango (often called the “Polar Bear Book”): This is the foundational text on information architecture, which is essentially the practical application of ontological principles for websites and software. It covers labelling systems, navigation, and search systems—all directly relevant to making concepts “easy to grok.”

  • “How to Make Sense of Any Mess” by Abby Covert: A very short, practical, and accessible handbook on information architecture. It’s a great “let’s do it now” guide that gets to the heart of defining and organising concepts.

Level 2: Diving into Ontology and the Semantic Web

This is where you get into the more formal aspects of the field. The “Semantic Web” is an effort to apply ontological principles to the entire internet, making it readable by machines.

  • “The Semantic Web: A Guide to the Future of XML, Web Services, and Knowledge Management” by Michael C. Daconta, Leo J. Obrst, and Kevin T. Smith: While some of the specific technologies have evolved, this book is an excellent introduction to the vision of the semantic web and the “why” behind ontologies.

  • “An Introduction to Ontology Engineering” by Maria Keet: This is a more formal textbook but is written to be an introduction. It covers the principles, practices, and languages (like OWL and RDF) used to build ontologies. It’s a great next step after you’ve grasped the fundamentals of information architecture.

  • Explore the Stanford Protégé Website: Protégé is a free, open-source ontology editor and a framework for building knowledge-based systems. Just looking through its documentation, tutorials, and examples will give you a concrete sense of how ontologies are built and used in practice.

As you read, you will encounter these related terms. Understanding them helps situate ontology within the broader landscape of knowledge organisation.

  • Taxonomy: A hierarchical classification of things. Think of the Linnaean system in biology (Kingdom, Phylum, Class…). A taxonomy is a type of ontology, but ontologies can also represent much richer relationships (e.g., part-of, causes, treats).

  • Controlled Vocabulary: A limited set of authorised terms used to index content. This ensures everyone uses the same word for the same concept (e.g., “myocardial infarction” instead of “heart attack,” “cardiac arrest,” or “coronary”).

  • Knowledge Graphs: These are a flexible and popular way of implementing ontologies. They represent a network of entities and the relationships between them. Google’s Knowledge Panel is a famous example.

By exploring these areas, you will develop a robust toolkit for critiquing, clarifying, and ultimately improving the structure and communication of complex theories like Bowen’s.

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