Ontology (AI and knowledge representation)

Ontology (AI and knowledge representation)

A formal, explicit specification of the concepts in a domain and the relationships between them, such as "a cat is a kind of mammal" or "a mammal has a spine", originally a tool of symbolic AI for representing structured knowledge that a system could reason over. Ontologies have found new relevance alongside retrieval-augmented generation: pairing a knowledge graph built on an ontology with a language model, an approach sometimes called "graph RAG", can ground retrieval in explicit relationships rather than relying purely on the similarity of embeddings. (See also: Symbolic AI, Retrieval-augmented generation)