The first series of questions I'm asking myself and want to share with you was prompted by this book I'm 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 while 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 thought 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 which I share with you, the reader, is:

What are things?

Whether they are from the real world, whether they originate from our minds, and we classify and name these things, these things in relation to each other. What we call entities in the study of semantic webs are related to these concepts and attempt to answer these questions.

So what defines a chair as a chair? Why does it have that name?

What makes them what they are, for us humans? Is it the names we give them? Are names abstractions, and things are what they are, and a chair is a chair, period? Does it have that name independent of our introspection and our thoughts about what a chair is?

So how did the process of creating the name "chair" and all that it signifies come about?

Is a chair a chair because of its function? Because of its shape 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 between the name and those characteristics?

And how do we humans agree among ourselves on how to name things?

How do we name things, firstly within the same domain , within the same language (Portuguese, for example), and how do we coordinate names among people who speak a different language?

What is the relationship between these two names in different languages?

Chair and chair, for example.

How does this work, how do we relate all of this? And the relationship between the thing itself, what we might 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 together all the things that exist in the world?

• Should we group them by name?
• Do we group by shape?
• Should we group them by their functionalities?

This is where this type of theoretical question, which has been studied for centuries by many theorists and philosophers, intersects with our SEO , especially Semantic SEO , which attempts to understand these entities and organize them into groups, with the clear objective of connecting these groups to other entities.

My work, primarily in applying Semantic Workflow, involves using taxonomies and ontologies to connect the entities that are part of a project, seeking to understand the possible connections and how to aid the creation of web content creation , and content utilization. This organization helps platforms and their content interact better with search , which require this organization for a proper understanding of everything an organization publishes on the web.

This post was inspired by a series of short videos I recorded in an attempt to share some questions that came to mind during my studies in SEO, semantic web, ontologies, and taxonomies, which are now related to my work and the methodology I created, called 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.