The study of being. ‘Ontology comprises theories, or sets of theories, which seek to answer questions about what the world must be like for knowledge to be possible’ (S. Aitken and G. Valentine, eds 2006). Each discipline has its own ontology: ‘economists tend to think about labour markets in terms of wages and human capital: workers locate where they receive the highest returns for their skills…in contrast, geographers typically see labour location as a result of worker attachments to complex, fixed social institutions and networks’ (Ashby and Monk (2007) Oxonomics 2, 1). See Boschma and Martin (2007) J. Econ. Geog. 7, 5 on ontology for evolutionary economic geography. A debate on the ontologies of scale occupies much of the (2007) TIBG 32, passim.
http://data.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/ontology UK Ordnance Survey ontologies.