New research in psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and other fields is published every day, but the gap between what is known and the capacity to act on that knowledge has never been larger. Scholars and non-scholars alike face the problem of how to organize knowledge and to integrate new observations with what is already known. Ontologies — formal, explicit specifications of the meaning of the concepts and entities that scientists study — provide a way to address this and other challenges, and thus to accelerate progress in behavioral research and its application. A new consensus study on the matter from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, includes contributions from NAS member Randall Engle, professor in the School of Psychology and principal investigator of Georgia Tech's Attention and Working Memory Lab.