Ontologies and Knowledge Bases. Towards a Terminological Clarification

The word “ontology ” has recently gained a good popularity within the knowledge engineering community. However, its meaning tends to remain a bit vague, as the term is used in very different ways. Limiting our attention to the various proposals made in the current debate in AI, we isolate a number of interpretations, which in our opinion deserve a suitable clarification. We elucidate the implications of such various interpretations, arguing for the need of clear terminological choices regarding the technical use of terms like “ontology”, “conceptualization ” and “ontological commitment”. After some comments on the use “Ontology ” (with the capital “o”) as a term which denotes a philosophical discipline, we analyse the possible confusion between an ontology intended as a particular conceptual framework at the knowledge level and an ontology intended as a concrete artifact at the symbol level, to be used for a given purpose. A crucial point in this clarification effort is the careful analysis of Gruber’ s definition of an ontology as a specification of a conceptualization. 1