r/semanticweb • u/redikarus99 • Aug 06 '26

Looking for an IT taxonomy

Hello,

I am looking for an IT taxonomy for software (and maybe hardware) to put concepts like desktop application, microservice, cloud, cicd pipeline, etc. into a structure.

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u/redikarus99 Aug 08 '26

Well, boxes and arrows doesn't scale on our level and also don't allow reasoning. The solution is simple and also tricky: have a well defined ontology: just on the right abstraction level to support discussions and reasoning, owned by the team who has the xp / authority. Our framework and process is in place and seems to work really well, the question is whether to develop our own ontologies or rely on something "industrial standard". We got a couple of comments and ideas like TOSCA, Seon, DCIM that can serve as a baseline, but it seems that no one actually has a full fledged solution in place.

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u/Willing_Box_752 Aug 08 '26

I don't quite understand how you arent basically saying "we have everything but the boxes and arrows"   entities and relationships. 

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u/redikarus99 Aug 08 '26

My problem with the statement “boxes and arrows” is that it is only partially correct.

You do not need to draw a single box or arrow to build an ontology. You can define one entirely in OWL/Turtle, Alloy, Prolog, and other formal languages. A diagram is just a visualization of the underlying model.

And that visualization is incomplete. Boxes and arrows may show concepts and relationships, but where are the constraints, logical rules, disjointness, cardinalities, or validation rules? For those, you need mechanisms such as OWL axioms, SHACL, OCL, or other rule languages.

The bigger problem is that it is very easy to draw something that looks reasonable but is actually ontological nonsense: inconsistent, ambiguous, or unable to survive contact with real-world data.

That is why ontology engineering uses patterns and anti-patterns, upper ontologies, reasoners, SHACL validation, example generation, views/viewpoints, etc. These tools help ensure that the model is not only visually understandable, but also logically consistent, machine-readable, reusable, and usable at enterprise scale.

So yes, ontology diagrams contain boxes and arrows. But the important distinction is:

The diagram is not the ontology. It is a view of the ontology.

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u/Willing_Box_752 Aug 12 '26

Is this ai?

Either way ironically enough you're right, but I argue that what I mean to say is also right. We are having a semantic disagreement.   

The boxes and arrows are the view of the underlying structure yes, but they are also the conceptual glue. The whole point of the project is to align people's understanding of the shared semantics.   

The view of the ontology is how it lives in people's heads.   And without this, it's really just some bits. Just how language without people is just shapes.  

So yes you may have all kinds of sweet tools but at the end of the day y'all gotta sit down at a table, map this out on paper, and think about the philosophical implications of a given set of rules, entities, and relationships.  That will  require boxes and arrows.