Ontological foundations for geographic information science1

For present purposes, the opposition between 1 and 2 is especially important. Ontology in the first sense can also be characterized as a conception of ontology as a theory of reality, by analogy with any other scientific theory, though specializing primarily in the preparation of taxonomies of the types of entities existing in a given domain (including, again, the types of relations which unify these entities together into complex wholes of different sorts). Ontology in the second sense can be characterized as a conception of ontology as a second-level theory relating to the first-level theories about reality or, more generally, to the various “conceptualizations” embraced by human beings for particular scientific and non-scientific purposes. Additionally, ontological research in sense 1 is pure or basic research carried out with the aim of increasing human knowledge, where ontological research in sense 2 forms theoretical foundations for the design of next-generation information systems and databases.