Indeed, I am interested in knowledge engineering and semantic web  which in fact are subjects,  technological tools that we use to formalise a certain number of fields
which are not necessarily scientific fields, to formalise them from the inside, so the objects of a field and  and the connections they can have with other objects, so I mean fields in the broadest meaning of the word,
it can be banks for example, any field you can imagine, a very specific field or a slightly larger one.
Ontologies can be made regarding objects, regarding work processes,well, anything that can be formalised for computerisation ends.
This project was previously led by artificial intelligence, particularly by specialised systems, and the idea was to formalise a field so that, once formalised, we could allow machines to perform inferences, reasonings, based on that field's entities and generate knowledge.
The word ontology was imported from philosophy, it was borrowed from philosophy by the designer of artificial intelligence, John McCarthy,
who  invented the word artificial intelligence  what we call logical artificial intelligence because that's what we're talking about, there are other side branches in artificial intelligence.
I'm rather in line with,or at least I'm interested in that branch
and the word ontology actually has a complicated history, so I won't go into too much detail,
but it refers to a theory of the object that comes out, one popularised as a theory of something that exists
, let's say it's a theory of what exists in its popularised version.
That word has been adopted by John McCarthy to actually refer to what exists in a field,  so we are going to formalise what exists in a field,
the objects existing in a field, the relationships they have with other objects as I was saying earlier.
in philosophy, actually we rather say ontology in the singular form, so it's a very important philosophical concept.
Computer sciences took hold of that word bearing in mind that there was more than one ontology because  those were field related ontologies, so there's a difference, computer science's ontologies are technical artifacts.
Philosophical ontologies are not really technical artifacts,ontologies are plural,
however, even if there is a meaning shift from one to the other, which is obviously important, some constants remain, in particular the fact that computer sciences will reach out to philosophy
when looking for tools to create a model for those fields, create a model for those circumstances, what is in a limited space, and sometimes when trying to combine several formalised fields, we will use what is called high level ontologies.
Then again, to develop concepts describing reality in a very abstract way,we will reach out for philosophy,that's what knowledge engineers do.
That's what's needed to enrich these concepts and actually connect those ontologies to one another.
Philosophers are actually working in the field of computer science ontologies, like Barry Smith for example,
who calls himself an ontologist, he doesn't refer to himself as a philosopher, but as an ontologist. But he doesn't make ontologies  like people who usually work on knowledge engineering, he rather does it in a philosopher's way
so that dialog and insight are interesting without necessarily agreeing to a particular view over another completely.
I like to reflect on the notion of a digital world, I like that sentence from Gerard berry
from in his original lecture at the Collège de France, which says:
"How does the world interrogate itself?
How does the world become digital?"
Becoming digital is something that interests me, well I'm not the first one to think about it,
but something that I think it  is very important to understand, is a matter that had particularly been raised through artificial intelligence  by a researcher named Phi Agre
Who started working  on artificial intelligence and ended up in social sciences.
He noticed that artificial intelligence, as I was saying earlier, fields are going to be formalised, but digital will generally create models for all kinds of fields,
fields will be formalised,they will be made operational, that can be operationalized, without necessarily staying true to the field that we formalised.
I think that, what the digital does, is taking hold of some concepts, practices, values,formalising them, operationalizing them, digitalizing them, quite simply,and transforming them by doing so.
So in a way, I can take an example to illustrate my meaning, digital trust for example, I mean trust as it is defined by sociologists, it will rather involve not knowing something, trust is in fact related to non-knowledge.
If I entrust my son to the nanny, and set up an apparatus with cameras filming her 24/7, that means I don't trust the nanny, right?
let's confess that in this case this idea of digital surveillance to generate prints allowing me to follow everything that's going on is not in the end a trust apparatus but rather one of mistrust towards that nanny
Trust would be,"I entrust her with my son,I don't know what's going on, but I consent to entrust her with my son nonetheless". That's what trusting somebody means.
And in a way, by operationalizing trust, we end up with the opposite result, which is
in fact operationalizing mistrust, so digitalisation transforms the values or the concepts it operationalizes, and sometimes it transforms them to the opposite of what they previously were.
That would be the case with law, which is a good example in that matter, which incidentally makes the connection with the ontologies I was talking about earlier,
because there are actually legal ontologies to try to understand, to try to reason from a law perspective, but one of the important developments of the last few years, it's like law being retrospective,I mean justice is done retrospectively, after a trial, a judgement, etc.
Justice is done after the facts actually happened and today, law is becoming preemptive, a preemptive law,if you will, just like wars,"preemptive wars" it's the same,
law is also transforming that way, so now law aims at preventing  a certain number of crimes or infractions
So we are going to ask third parties, that can be companies by the way, to use their algorithms, their data, the personal data they have on people, to prevent a certain number of crimes or behaviours from happening, so there is also a transformation, we go from retrospective to preemptive.
Preemptive law would have been nonsensical before,but technically equipped  thanks to digital, it tends to become the norm.
So that's something that really needs  to be thought through, the way in which digital  not only transforms the world, the world becomes digital, but that state of affairs changes certain practices  and values in doing so, and we cannot assert that the new values that are appearing are values to which we can identify ourselves.
We can add a little additional comment to Gerard Berry's statement, which is: yes, the world is becoming digital, but I think, and I'm not the only one,
if we look at this a bit closer, the world cannot afford to stay that way, digital, and that's something very important because digital technologies are not only about computer sciences,
they also involve concrete developments, materials, that need metals,resources, energy, etc.  And from that perspective, digital technologies are actually very expensive, take machine learning tools for example,deep learning machines that large companies use, the algorithms they use  are very energy consuming,so those things cannot  necessarily be generalised under every circumstances.
So I think the interest  of all this is to realise that the world is digitalizing, that it cannot stay that way, and that everything is happening very fast.
We can't simply think we are living a revolution and keep on thinking that we are in a revolution, which is a reassuring idea, in a way.
There's an evolution, this one, but we need to realise that we are facing an evolution parallel to other evolutions,
like climate change for example, we can also think about  a potential downfall, and we are going to have to think about all those elements together
we need to resynchronise futures that aren't at the moment, everything will be resynchronized in the future, we don't know how precisely, and the point is to know, that digital revolution we are living, that digital state of the world is temporary,
so i believe that we need to think about the end of the digital world, at the moment it's exploding, but we need to think about its end,and we need to figure out other models
That's why I believe that digital cultures are partly temporary, that digital future is partly temporary and that's very hard to realise today.
So as a conclusion, I'd say that maybe we need to look into the words "digital world" to find some food for thought regarding all the problems, or rather all the issues, that I just mentioned, particularly because the link between "world" and "digital" is not obvious at all,
we can actually consider that the world is not digital in itself, it is not quiet, it is not digital, it needs to be quieted,it needs to be digitalized, and the digital world generates an output which has a huge material cost, so saying that the world is digitalizing, it's not so simple.
It involves lengthy,costly and considerable processes. So we need to think about a dialectic for this digitalizing world, what is it actually? What are we leaving behind from the Ancient World? What can't we afford to leave behind? What are we going to keep?
So there's a legacy issue that is going to be at the heart of this digital world's future,and if we take in consideration that it cannot stay digital in the end
we have to realise that it is only a second layer, what are we going to  inherit from the digital world?  Because it may disappear, so those questions are also questions left to us by the digital world:  what do we keep? What do we leave behind? So I think those are the real questions for the future,and particularly for the future generations.