Re: "what is an ontology?" stuff in requirements abstract/intro

Hi Webont-Members,

> "what is an ontology?" stuff in requirements abstract/intro
> From: Dan Connolly <connolly@w3.org>
...
> let's
> see if there's some text to grab... yes:
> 
>   Put simply, an ontology is just a set of
>   standard vocabularly terms along with some
>   formal definitions of the terms.
> 
> Lightly edited:
> 
>   An ontology is vocabularly of terms along
>   with some formal definitions of the terms.

I am a little bit surprised that - though nearly all papers about
ontologies refer to Tom Gruber´s "shared conceptualization" definition -
all proposals in this group only capture the "conceptualization" aspect
but don´t mention the "sharing" aspect.
In the requirements document there is a paragraph titled "3.1 Shared
Ontologies" which would - accepting Tom's definition - expand to "3.1
Shared Shared Conceptualizations".
In my opinion, a good definition of the term ontology should cover both
aspects, sharing and conceptualizing. Otherwise, we should consequently
only talk about conceptualizations (e.g., "A conceptualization is
vocabularly of terms along with some formal definitions of the terms."),
not ontologies.

What do you think about this topic?

Best regards,
 Ludger

______________________________________________________________________
Ludger van Elst
Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH
Erwin-Schrödinger-Straße Geb. 57/377, D-67608 Kaiserslautern, Germany
Tel.  : 0631 205-3474
E-mail: elst@dfki.uni-kl.de  
WWW   : http://www.dfki.uni-kl.de/~elst/
______________________________________________________________________

Received on Thursday, 14 February 2002 04:36:50 UTC