What is an Ontology (Database?)?

Question

I was just reading this article and it mentions that some organization had an Ontology as(?) their database(?) layer, and that the decision to do this was bad. Problem is I

Answer 1

Some of the comments above seem a bit dismissive. I've used an ontology database in a real product and it was the only way to solve the problem. An ontology can be used to create a database that can encompass the complexities of the real world much better than something like an relational database. More "information" than "data". It's especially good when the relationships are complex and the information set is large and incomplete. Especially neat is the query mechanism in a good ontology database - it intelligently uses the schema/ontology (such as any class hierarchies) to return answers that would not be found otherwise.