Ontology

Ontology is "...a systematic arrangement of all of the important categories of objects or concepts which exist in some field of discourse, showing the relations between them. When complete, an ontology is a categorization of all of the concepts in some field of knowledge, including the objects and all of the properties, relations, and functions needed to define the objects and specify their actions."

So, an ontology is a language to represent all the objects in your field, along with their properties, and relationships. For example, a trade contains an instrument. A trade contains a price. An option instrument is a type of instrument. An option instrument contains an underlying instrument. An index instrument is a type of instrument. An index instrument consists of sub instruments. etc... I am thinking that in theory, you could represent an entire industry or a body of knowledge using an ontology. In theory, once you have a representational space, and given a new instance of an object, you could apply the object to the ontology; find your place, and then be able to walk the ontology to figure out all the possible causes and effects.

There has been some work done. W3C came out with a language specification - owl. Also, see the links below for more references.



Links
http://jena.sourceforge.net/
http://sweetrules.projects.semwebcentral.org
http://protege.stanford.edu/