Nontological Engineering
Waclaw Kusnierczyk
International Conference on Formal Ontology in Information Systems (FOIS 2006)
Baltimore, Maryland (USA), November 9-11, 2006
Abstract
What is ontology? This article reflects an attempt to systematize the meanings behind terms used by philosophers and computer scientists in the context of ontology and ontological engineering. We strive to provide a workable understanding for what it is that ontological engineers are talking about, and how they should talk about it. We show that a common reference terminology is needed to connect terms in representational artifacts to their respective meanings; without such a reference, statements in and about knowledge representation languages will be ambiguous, both as between various languages and within a single language, and -- as our examples will show -- may easily be seen as not much more than nonsense.
We identify problems common to a number of knowledge representation languages used to represent ontologies, and show how the proposed reference terminology can be used to disambiguate and fix the meanings of different, evidently confused statements in and about these languages. Our final conclusion is not that this particular system of meanings is the ultimate one to serve as a common reference, but that it is desirable and, in fact, necessary to have such a standard terminology, if cross-paradigm and cross-language communication is to be achieved.