Formal ontology

Formal ontology is like a way of organizing information so that everyone can understand it. It's like a giant map that shows how all the things in the world are connected.

Let's say you want to organize all the different types of animals. You might put all the birds in one group, all the fish in another group, and all the mammals in a third group. And then within each group, you might organize them even further. For example, within the bird group, you could have a group for birds of prey, a group for water birds, and a group for songbirds.

It's like making a really organized list, but with a special way of writing it down that makes it easy for computers to understand.

This can be really helpful when people want to build websites or apps that need to understand lots of different kinds of things. Without formal ontology, it might be really difficult for different computer programs to communicate with each other and understand what each other is talking about.

So, formal ontology is like a super-organized map of all the different things in the world, making it easier for computers to talk to each other and for people to understand how things are connected.