The first in the series of questions that I ask myself and want to share with you was prompted by this book I am reading called Ontology in Information Science – Theory and Method. And I begin by asking myself what things are.
In it the debate about ontologies is conducted from a theoretical point of view and the questions I asked myself in reading are related to the fact that an ontology is involved in what I can call the process of understanding why things are what they are. Another important potential of ontological thinking is in understanding the relationship between the naming of things, the names we give to these things, and the things themselves,
So the question I asked myself and that I share with you who read me is:
What are things?
Whether they are from the real world, whether they come from our mind and we classify and name these things, things in relation to each other. What we call entities in the study of the Semantic Web are related to these concepts and attempt to answer these questions.
So what defines that a chair is a chair? Why does it have this name?
What makes them be what they are, for us humans? Are they the names we give them? Are the names abstractions and things are what they are and a chair is a chair and that’s it? Does it have this name independent of our introspection and our thinking about a chair?
And how does the process of creating the naming of this word “chair” and everything it means happen?
Is a chair a chair because of its function? Because of its form and how it exists in the world? Or because of the name we give it? Is it because of its intrinsic characteristics or the relationship of the name to these characteristics?
And how do we humans agree among ourselves on how to name things?
How do we give names to things, first within the same domain, within the same language (Portuguese, for example), and how do we agree among people who speak another language?
What is the relationship between these two names, in different languages?
Cadeira and chair, for example.
How does this work, how do we relate all of this? And the relationship between the thing itself, what we can call the thing in the real world, and the thing in the Ideal World or the world of ideas, the thing in the world of language? How does this create categories, how do we categorize all of this?
How should we group these things that exist in the world?
- Do we group by name?
- Do we group by form?
- Do we group by their functionalities?
It is at this point that this type of theoretical question, which has been studied for centuries by many theorists and philosophers, intersects with our work in SEO, especially in Semantic SEO, which attempts to understand these entities and organize them into groups, with a clear objective of connecting these groups to other entities.
My work, especially in the application of the Semantic Workflow, is to use taxonomies and ontologies in the process of linking the entities that are part of a project to each other, seeking to understand what the possible connections are and how to assist the process of creating web projects and platforms, creating content and utilizing these contents, making this taxonomic and ontological organization help platforms and their contents interact better with search algorithms that require this organization for the proper understanding of everything an organization publishes on the Web.
This post was inspired by a series of short videos that I recorded in an attempt to share some questions that came to my mind during my studies in SEO, the Semantic Web, ontologies, and taxonomies, which today are related to my work and the methodology I created, called the Semantic Workflow, and some thoughts for the future of SEO.
Semantic Questions is a series of videos with questions that I ask myself and share with you.