Ontologies are widely used, e.g., in science and commerce. This is because they provide a way of linking data together that makes for effective searching and inference.

Their uses for accelerating the behavioural sciences is are presented in a report by the US National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine (NASEM).

Having a unique ID for every class of entity and relationship means that you just have to refer to that ID for it to be clear what it is you are talking about. This avoids the common problem we have in the behavioural sciences when we use words such as ‘stress’ or ‘intelligence’ or ‘addiction’ without being precise about what we mean. An ontology enables us to refer to different types of e.g. ‘stress’ that are separate and uniquely defined entities with their own IDs but can be linked together.

Ontologies are closely linked with what is known as the semantic web whose goal is to make as much information as possible machine-readable and searchable. This has vastly improved the ability to find and use information on the web. Ontologies support this aim by using web links in the form of URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) as the identifiers of every entity.

For an excellent technical introduction to use of ontologies in the semantic web see https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780123859655/semantic-web-for-the-working-ontologist

Once ontologies become widely used in the behavioural sciences we will wonder how we managed to do science without them.