Ontology on emsenn.net

Immanence

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Immanence is the claim that causes, structures, and standards of critique are internal to the forms being analyzed.

In dialectical method, immanent critique evaluates a position using that position’s own claims and commitments, showing how internal tensions produce revision or breakdown.

In metaphysics, immanence is often contrasted with transcendence: explanation is sought within being, relation, or process itself, not in an external principle standing outside the world.

Upper Ontologies and Knowledge Organization

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Every major upper ontology divides reality by mode of being — how things exist — rather than by topic, discipline, or domain. No upper ontology lists “physics,” “biology,” and “sociology” as top-level categories. This is a finding, not an accident, and it has consequences for how knowledge libraries should be organized.

¶Four upper ontologies

BFO (Basic Formal Ontology) divides everything into two categories: continuants (entities that persist through time and maintain their identity — objects, qualities, roles) and occurrents (entities that unfold in time — processes, events, temporal regions). BFO became ISO/IEC 21838-2 in 2020. It is deliberately minimal: 36 classes, no domain content, designed as a top-level framework that domain ontologies extend. Its philosophical lineage runs through Aristotelian substance ontology.

Biomedical Ontologies

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Biomedical ontologies are formal classification systems that organize biological and medical knowledge into machine-processable structures. They are among the most successful applications of the Semantic Web’s core technologies — and they succeed precisely because their domain warrants the rigidity those technologies impose.

The Gene Ontology (GO), launched in 1998 and described by Ashburner et al. in 2000, is the paradigmatic case [@ashburner2000]. GO provides a controlled vocabulary for describing gene products across species: their molecular functions, the biological processes they participate in, and the cellular components where they are active. When a researcher in Tokyo annotates a mouse gene with a GO term and a researcher in Toronto queries for human genes with the same annotation, the term means the same thing in both contexts. That semantic stability enables cross-species comparison, large-scale data integration, and automated inference at a scale that informal vocabularies cannot support.

Semantic Web, Jiangshi Web

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

¶Abstract

The Semantic Web did not fail. RDF graphs are queried daily, knowledge graphs underpin search engines, biomedical ontologies coordinate research across institutions. The problem is not that the Semantic Web stopped working but that it works in a particular way — data circulates, queries execute, triples accumulate, and none of it can question whether its own categories still fit.

Chinese folklore has a figure for this condition: the jiangshi (僵尸), the hopping corpse. A body whose joints have locked, animated by residual vital energy but incapable of flexible movement. The jiangshi is not dead. Its problem is more specific: it cannot change how it moves.

Describing the Zombie

Sun, 09 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

¶Orientation — From Representation to Ontology

Critical attention to the zombie has long revolved around its representational elasticity. Within cultural studies the figure is treated as a mirror for historical anxieties: colonial servitude, viral globalization, consumerism, environmental collapse. Yet these readings, while valuable, leave an unasked question at the center of their interpretive field: what is the zombie such that it can bear so many metaphoric burdens without ceasing to be itself? The present study answers by describing the *zombie as an ontological form*—a particular configuration of life, death, and relation that recurs whenever vitality is detached from reflexivity.