Heather Hedden, author of The Accidental Taxonomist and one of the clearer voices in the controlled vocabulary world, recently posed a question on her blog that turns out to be deceptively subtle: Is a taxonomy an ontology? The question came up at this year’s Knowledge Graph Conference, where she noted that many practitioners conflate the two — treating taxonomies as merely “simpler” ontologies, or assuming that synonyms and alternative labels belong to the ontological layer rather than the taxonomic one.

Heather’s answer is characteristically practical: taxonomies and ontologies are distinct in purpose, even if a taxonomy can be modelled as an instance of an upper ontology. … I largely agree. But I want to push deeper, …  [a] taxonomy is precisely the layer that an LLM can use. — Read More