Ontology

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People use the word ontology to mean different things, e.g. glossaries & 
data dictionaries, thesauri & taxonomies, schemas & data models, and 
formal ontologies & inference. A formal ontology is a controlled vocabulary 
expressed in an ontology representation language.
This language has a grammar for using vocabulary terms to express something 
meaningful within a specified domain of interest. The grammar contains formal 
constraints (e.g., specifies what it means to be a well-formed statement, 
assertion, query, etc.) on how terms in the ontol-ogy's controlled vocabulary 
can be used together.
People make commitments to use a specific controlled vocabulary or ontology for 
a domain of interest. Enforcement of an ontology's grammar may be rigorous or 
lax. Frequently, the grammar for a "light-weight" ontology is not 
completely specified, i.e., it has implicit rules that are not explicitly 
documented.
  
=== Useful Reading ===
http://www.mindswap.org/ University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer
Studies <br>
http://dbpedia.org/docs/ Querying Wikipedia like a Database