How does an ontology differ from a taxonomy?
Ontologies share the hierarchical structure of taxonomies, but they make extra demands on the objects they include.. Explicit rules or axioms describe the relationship between a node (e.g, parent or container) and the objects included in that node (children or contained objects). The Linnaean biological taxonomy is an ontology in which each species is also a member of the containing genus. The Semantic Web uses ontologies that conceptualize (describe in terms agreed to by participants in a community of discourse) some domain of phenomenal knowledge in a formal way that allows computers to make inferences about a term from its containing relationships. For example, that a bulldog is a dog in some contexts.
