An active ontology is one derived from actual empirical? research in a particular domain, with the aim of producing action not more research. To be active requires every command verb to be reflective? and a few to have a reflexive property?.

For example, the Artemis http://www.srdc.metu.edu.tr/webpage/projects/artemis/ medical ontology? project is "a European Commission? funded project that aims to define a semantic web service-based P2P? signal infrastructure for interoperability of medical information systems. Among its main purposes are:

1. provide interoperability of medical information systems through semantically enriched web services (using a two phase process through, first a Message Ontology Mapping Process? and then a Message Instance Mapping?);
2. to find and retrieve clinical information about a particular patient from different healthcare organizations where concrete sources are unknown.

relation to upper and living ontology

More formally, an active ontology is an upper ontology with a reflective? tensegrity created by constant comparison of performance under stress, ''what Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi? calls "flow?").

Some reflexive verb?s may be involved, but only to cause the user feedback - the whole design and deployment of the system is not likely to be wholly reflexive, though it may have a reflexive user interface.

Such an ontology defines pronoun, commit verbs and so on, i.e. "who's we?" and "what we want" and some means to further self-organize, e.g. twelve levers.

relation to living ontology

As political virtues remain pragmatically necessary to make politics as usual bearable at all, the praxis? that can actually be exploited in open politics requires adding cognitive politics and body distinction?s from embodied philosophy?, enactivism? and feminism?. This should make a living ontology with a more reflexive character, driven more by operational distinction?s of its actual users, and less by experts studying the field of use.