I realise that sometimes some of the meanings of the words we are using are missed or misunderstood. So I went to Wikepedia and got a few definitions to clarify some of these concepts that we are using and frequently referr to.
”Vocabulary’‘ is the set of words a person is familiar with in a language. A vocabulary usually grows and evolves with age, and serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge.
”Ontology’‘ is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality in general, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations. Ontology deals with questions concerning what entities exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped, related within a hierarchy, and subdivided according to similarities and differences. Principal questions of ontology are “What can be said to exist?”, “Into what categories, if any, can we sort existing things?”, “What are the meanings of being?”, “What are the various modes of being of entities?”
”Taxonomy” is the practice and science of classification. A taxonomy, or taxonomic scheme, is a particular classification (“the taxonomy of …”), arranged in a hierarchical structure. Typically this is organized by supertype-subtype relationships, also called generalization-specialization relationships, or less formally, parent-child relationships. In such an inheritance relationship, the subtype by definition has the same properties, behaviors, and constraints as the supertype plus one or more additional properties, behaviors, or constraints.
A ”thesaurus” is a book that lists words grouped together according to similarity of meaning (containing synonyms and sometimes antonyms), in contrast to a dictionary, which contains definitions and pronunciations. In Information Science, Library Science, and Information Technology, specialized ”thesauri” are designed for information retrieval. They are a type of controlled vocabulary, for indexing or tagging purposes. Such a thesaurus can be used as the basis of an index for online material.
”Folksonomy” is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content; this practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 as part of social software applications such as social bookmarking and photograph annotation. Tagging, which is one of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 services, allows users to collectively classify and find information. Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy.
All this because I’m working on vocab.ox.ac.uk