[Air-l] Origin of the term "Internet" ?

[James Whyte]

I have received comments both onlist and offlist about my comments on this thread. I offer this as a source for my reasoning. My apology for not doing this earlier.  What is an Ontology?    Tom Gruber <gruber at ksl.stanford.edu>      
Short answer:   
   An ontology is a specification of a conceptualization.   The word "ontology" seems to generate a lot of controversy in discussions about AI. It has a long history in philosophy, in which it refers to the subject of existence. It is also often confused with epistemology, which is about knowledge and knowing.   In the context of knowledge sharing, I use the term ontology to mean a specification of a conceptualization. That is, an ontology is a description (like a formal specification of a program) of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents. This definition is consistent with the usage of ontology as set-of-concept-definitions, but more general. And it is certainly a different sense of the word than its use in philosophy.   What is important is what an ontology is for. My colleagues and I have been designing ontologies for the purpose of enabling knowledge sharing and reuse. In that context, an ontology is a specification used for
 making ontological commitments. The formal definition of ontological commitment is given below. For pragmetic reasons, we choose to write an ontology as a set of definitions of formal vocabulary. Although this isn't the only way to specify a conceptualization, it has some nice properties for knowledge sharing among AI software (e.g., semantics independent of reader and context). Practically, an ontological commitment is an agreement to use a vocabulary (i.e., ask queries and make assertions) in a way that is consistent (but not complete) with respect to the theory specified by an ontology. We build agents that commit to ontologies. We design ontologies so we can share knowledge with and among these agents.   This definition is given in the article:   T. R. Gruber. A translation approach to portable ontologies. Knowledge Acquisition, 5(2):199-220, 1993. Available on line.   A more detailed description is given in   T. R. Gruber. Toward principles for the design of
 ontologies used for knowledge sharing. Presented at the Padua workshop on Formal Ontology, March 1993, to appear in an edited collection by Nicola Guarino. Available online. 
   
  http://www-ksl.stanford.edu/kst/what-is-an-ontology.html

 
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