Formal ontology meets industry

In the last fifteen years Formal Ontology has become a fruitful area of research and, perhaps more importantly, has attracted interest from practitioners in a variety of applicative domains like business and knowledge management, conceptual modeling, engineering and medical science, just to name a few. Such a success should not hide a dismaying fact, namely that after all these years, after the widespread recognition of the initial intuitions, after the excitement of the first period has faded into a more mature attitude – after all this we still have not been able to put forward clear examples of the advantage of adopting the ontology approach in implemented systems. One should not jump to the conclusion that this result marks the failure of ontology application. The resources and insights that ontology offers us are too evident and valuable to be dismissed so quickly. Instead, one must search for the reasons that brought us to such a situation. Without entering into a discussion of the (sometimes dubious) benefits of international research programs that have taken place in these years, we notice that today there are several places, including this journal and international conferences like FOIS (Formal Ontology in Information Systems, www.formalontology.org), where people can present their ontologies, advertise their tools for ontology manipulation and integration, or even discuss what an ontology is or is not1. However, no stable forum is provided where people from the applicative domains can share with theoreticians their ideas on how to use ontologies, why and where they are needed, and which answers an ontology should provide to prove its usefulness. On the other hand, research in ontology is quite abstract and often based on toy-examples to the point that the gap between the work of theoreticians and the needs of real applications is too wide to be crossed: researchers do not have enough domain expertise to show how to implement a formal system to make it suitable for specific problems, while domain practitioners do not seem to have a clear understanding of the subtleties of ontology to push forward innovative uses or original solutions based on this approach. We believe this gap is today one of the major reasons for not having a clear assessment of the import that Formal Ontology brings in traditional application domains like rationalization of production, financial accounting (say, in production and services), and human resource management.