Ontologies

A ten-lecture audio course and a searchable knowledge base, built from the awesome-ontology list and a research pass that filled the gaps it left.

• The lectures — ten talks, about 4.2 hours, each with a plain-text file a reader app can fetch.
• Synthesis — the argument of the whole corpus in one essay.
• Notes — 181 notes on tools, languages, vocabularies, and arguments.
• Glossary — every term in one alphabetical list.

What is here that is not in the source list

The original list covers standards, tooling, reasoners, and vocabularies well. It has nothing on where the idea came from, the criticism of it, or the operational sense Palantir uses. Thirteen notes were added for that: the history from Aristotle to Wolff, Quine on ontological commitment, Gruber’s definition, Cyc, the 2001 Semantic Web vision and what became of it, the knowledge graph turn, Doctorow, Shirky, Bowker and Star, Palantir’s Ontology and the case against it, and the argument about whether large language models replace any of this.

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Source

Notes, transcripts, and the generator for this site live in matthiasdebernardini/ontology-notes. Notes are CC BY 4.0, code is MIT.