Ontology
* Most ontologies represent and support relationships among classes of meaning.
  * ' house within philosophy's major branch metaphysics, which is theory of reality. Ontology establishes categories.
* Ontologies are arrangements
  - formal data structures used to define terminology
  - potentially reusable pieces of domain knowledge
  - establish a joint terminology between members of a community of interest
* Ontologies provide an important resource to integrate information
  - specification of concepts in domain
  - support in integrating heterogeneous and distributed information sources
  - seek to create and share terminology and meaning within a group or organization
* can also be a classification that the information in an information source is based on.
* concerns the significant factors in global political economy.
* covers the design and implementation of ontologies in bioinformatics.
* deals with such notions as time, space, substance, thing, motion, and change.
* emerges from epistemology when organisms evolve sufficiently to conceptualize.
* fancy word for the science of being.
* fundamental interpretation of the ultimate constituents of the world of experience.
* general study of substance.
* has to do with the nature of our substance, our being, as persons.
* is accused of dealing with the merely abstract
  - cultural
  - defined in various ways by different people
* is the branch of metaphysics that examines the nature of reality
  - philosophy that addresses the question of being
  - field of metaphysics about what exists
  - newest label to be attached to some knowledge organization systems
  - philosophical study of what can be considered real
* is the study of being and, in particular, the investigation of the nature of being human
  - essence, and economy is the study of function
  - existence
* is the study of the kinds of things that exist
  - philosophy of being
  - theory of being
* learning greatly facilitates the construction of ontologies.
* means world view.
* plays an important role in knowledge sharing and reuse.
* refers to existence and to being
  - that branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of existence
* studies the laws of dependence among different levels.
* word adopted by researchers in artificial intelligence and knowledge representation.

### ontology:

Gene ontology
* puts the data into groups based on genes.
+ Protein Data Bank: Chemistry :: Proteins
  * Many scientists have to send their information to the database. The PDB has the original or primary data. Hundreds of other databases reuse the data. These secondary databases organize the information in different ways. For example, both SCOP and CATH put structures into groups organized by type of structure and ideas about how they are related through evolution. Gene ontology puts the data into groups based on genes.

### oogamous:

True plant
* All true plants are oogamous
  - form a phragmoplast during cell division
  - have an alternation of heteromorphic generations
* have a phragmoplast and the nuclear envelope disappears.

Opaque object
* absorb and reflect light
  - or reflect the light
* are primitives similar to enumeration literals in a programming language.

Open access
* cooperative program designed to link people with resources.
* is about a consumer's freedom to choose the broadband provider of their choice.
* means freedom of choice for all types of information and entertainment services.

Open adoption
* allows birthparents and adoptive parents to get to know each other
  - both sets of parents to know about each other
* is seen as a model built on candor, commitment, community, and cooperation
  - the adoption of the future
* means some level of contact between the birth and adoptive parents.

Operand
* are identifiers, literals, or types
  - quantities
+ Opcode: Computer science
  * Operands are typically memory or registry addresses.