Using the Ontology

The first impulse to build such an ontology is often the desire to control or enhance an authoring environment. For one, ontologies can be handed over to authors giving them more or less strict guidelines to follow. Ontologies can also be fed to authoring support systems like editors; when they interpret the constraints they can derive a form-driven input process and can prompt the author for optional or mandatory information.

It is worth noting that such an ontology normally only states minimal expectations on what the map should contain. Authors may be completely free to add topic and relationships which are not mentioned at all in the taxonomy. In such scenarios the ontology more behaves like a filter: An arbitrary map can be pushed against it and the filter will only pass through those topics and associations which adhere to the ontology. In that sense an ontology acts as a query.

Ontologies can also support the query and the retrieval process. This we discuss in more detail in the next part.