Ontological Foundations for Experimental Science Knowledge Bases (excerpt)

2. Principles of ontology design Ontology is an ancient term used by philosophers to mean “a particular theory about the nature of being or reality” (Woolf 1981). Ontology design starts with creating a conceptualization of the domain: one that specifies the possible objects or entities about which knowledge can be expressed (the fundamental categories), and the relationships that can hold among them. Every knowledge model is committed to some conceptualization, implicitly or explicitly. An explicit specification of this conceptualization is called an ontology (Gruber 1993). In artificial intelligence, an ontology must be formally specified, so that it can be interpreted by a computer program. As discussed in the previous section, the desire to share and re-use knowledge bases has created a need for the knowledge-representation community to adopt common ontological conventions, which in turn has motivated recent interest in the principles of ontology design.