7. A system for characterizing a target system, comprising: a characterization application stored in memory; and a processor communicating with the memory, the processor sending a query, the query comprising an ontology of interest that describes and represents a domain of interest, wherein the ontology of interest includes a plurality of nodes, each node of the plurality of nodes related to another node of the plurality of nodes, a predicate, and a scoring algorithm, the predicate describing a membership qualification for a node in the ontology of interest; the processor receiving a response comprising a score generated with the scoring algorithm, the score representing an evaluation of the predicate to metadata associated with the target system and how well the metadata matches the ontology of interest; the processor evaluating the score to characterize the target system, wherein the metadata of the target system is inaccessible to the processor; and wherein the system accepts that the metadata is inaccessible to a sender of the query.
7. A system for characterizing a target system, comprising: a characterization application stored in memory; and a processor communicating with the memory, the processor sending a query, the query comprising an ontology of interest that describes and represents a domain of interest, wherein the ontology of interest includes a plurality of nodes, each node of the plurality of nodes related to another node of the plurality of nodes, a predicate, and a scoring algorithm, the predicate describing a membership qualification for a node in the ontology of interest; the processor receiving a response comprising a score generated with the scoring algorithm, the score representing an evaluation of the predicate to metadata associated with the target system and how well the metadata matches the ontology of interest; the processor evaluating the score to characterize the target system, wherein the metadata of the target system is inaccessible to the processor; and wherein the system accepts that the metadata is inaccessible to a sender of the query. 11. A system according to claim 7 , wherein the scoring algorithm applies a weighting factor to a relationship between the plurality of nodes in the ontology.