Ontology : The Foundations of Its Formation, Place, and Application in Information and Semantic Web

With the advancement of science and the rise of information throughout the history of human civilization, the need for more effective storage and retrieval of this information has become increasingly significant. Therefore, through the scientific evolution, storage and retrieval tools were also evolved and shifted gradually from the keyword matching system toward meaning. The emergence of these tools, from ancient manual lists to the thematic headings in the nineteenth-century as well as thesauruses in the twentieth-century, illustrates such developments. Finally, with the arrival of computer sciences and digital environment specially web in the late twentieth century, the paradigm changed from the traditional storage and retrieval tools and based on keyword matching towards the tools of semantic relationship explanation, since with the emergence of the semantic web today, the use of ontologies has become crucial for the semantic and conceptual retrieval of information and knowledge on the Web. Among the conducted studies, there are only a few studies that have examined the history and foundations of ontology formation from the beginning and focused on its concept and application in the field of information. Accordingly, the current paper first deals with foundation of ontology formation, concept, and evolution from the beginning until now through a library research method and documentary research method, and then explains the place of ontologies in the field of information and retrieval of information especially semantic web.