Ontologies are now very widely used in science and commerce. This is because they provide a way of linking data together which makes for much more effective searching and inference using those data.

Having a unique ID for every entity means that you just have to refer to that ID for it to be 100% clear what it is you are talking about. This avoid the ubiquitous problem we have in behavioural sciences when we use words such as ‘stress’ or ‘intelligence’ or ‘addiction’ without being clear what we mean. Thus, for example, we can have different types of ‘stress’ that are uniquely defined and linked to together and referred to using their IDs.

Ontologies are intimately linked with what is known as the ‘semantic web’ whose goal is to make as much as possible of the information online machine readable. 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 as the identifiers very every entity. For an excellent technical introduction to this see https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780123859655/semantic-web-for-the-working-ontologist

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