An ontology is a structured framework for organizing knowledge and defining relationships among concepts, entities, and categories within a domain. In AI, it enables context-aware reasoning by providing a map of how things connect and what they mean in relation to each other.
A healthcare ontology that defines the relationships between symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, and medications allows an AI system to reason about clinical questions with significantly more precision than it could from unstructured text alone. Ontologies are particularly valuable in domains where precise relationships between concepts matter — healthcare, legal, scientific, and technical domains being the clearest examples.
