Summary
The word “ontology” is used with different senses in different communities. The most radical difference is perhaps between the philosophical sense, which has of course a well-established tradition, and the computational sense, which emerged in the recent years in the knowledge engineering community, starting from an early informal definition of (computational) ontologies as “explicit specifications of conceptualizations”. In this paper we shall revisit the previous attempts to clarify and formalize such original definition, providing a detailed account of the notions of conceptualization and explicit specification, while discussing at the same time the importance of shared explicit specifications.
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Notes
- 1.
The first books of Aristotle’s treatises, known collectively as “Organon,” deal with the nature of the world, i.e., physics. Metaphysics denotes the subjects dealt with in the rest of the books – among them Ontology. Philosophers sometimes equate Metaphysics and Ontology.
- 2.
Note, that the term “Ontology” itself was coined only in the early seventeenth century [13].
- 3.
Entity denotes the most general being, and, thus, subsumes subjects, objects, processes, ideas, etc.
- 4.
Unfortunately, the terminology used in Computer Science is problematic here. What we call “concepts” in this chapter may be better called “properties” or “categories.” Regrettably, “property” is used to denote a binary relation in RDF(S), so we shall avoid using it. Also, Smith made us aware that the notion of “concept” is quite ambiguous [14]. A way to solve the terminological conflict is to adopt the philosophical term “universal,” which roughly denotes those entities that can have instances; particulars are entities that do not have instances. What we call “concepts” correspond to unary universals, while “relations” correspond to binary universals.
- 5.
- 6.
The name of a person could also be assigned via relations, e.g., firstname(I046758,‘Daniel’) and lastname(I046758,‘Oberle’).
- 7.
To underly their link with conceptualizations, Guarino has proposed to call such intensional relations “conceptual relations” in [10].
- 8.
It is important to note that, if we want to provide a well-founded, grounded account of meaning, this system needs to be first of all a physical system, and not an abstract entity.
- 9.
Of course, properly speaking, it is an agent who commits to a conceptualization while using a certain language: what we call the language commitment is an account of the competent use of the language by an agent who adopts a certain conceptualization.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank our colleagues Aldo Gangemi, Susan Marie Thomas, Marta Sabou, as well as Pascal Hitzler for their fruitful reviews and discussions that helped to shape this contribution.
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Guarino, N., Oberle, D., Staab, S. (2009). What Is an Ontology?. In: Staab, S., Studer, R. (eds) Handbook on Ontologies. International Handbooks on Information Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-92673-3_0
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