International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 46(2-3), pp.

293–310, 1997

U NDERSTANDING , BUILDING , AND U SING

O NTOLOGIES
A commentary to “Using Explicit Ontologies in KBS Development”, by
van Heijst, Schreiber, and Wielinga

Nicola Guarino
LADSEB-CNR, National Research Council
Corso Stati Uniti 4, I-35127 Padova, Italy
guarino@[Link]

1. Introduction
In their paper on “Using Explicit Ontologies in KBS Development”, van
Heijst and colleagues1 seem to take for granted Bylander and Chan-
drasekaran’s hypothesis on the strong dependence of knowledge represesen-
tation on the nature and the inference strategy of the problem at hand, the so-
called interaction problem:

Representing knowledge for the purpose of solving some problem is strongly affected
by the nature of the problem and the inference strategy to be applied to the problem.
[Bylander and Chandrasekaran 1988]

The fact that the van Heijst and colleagues don’t attempt to explore in de-
tail the arguments sustaining this hypothesis is particularly puzzling, since
they admit that it contradicts one of the main assumptions of their well-known
KADS approach [Schreiber et al. 1993], namely the separation between do-
main knowledge and problem-solving knowledge. They report two reasons
brought by Bylander and Chandrasekaran to support their hypothesis:
“Firstly, the application task determines to a large extent which kinds of
knowledge should be encoded. (...) Secondly, the knowledge must be en-
coded in such a way that the inference strategy used can reason efficiently”.
In fact, at a closer inspection, the statement from Bylander and Chan-
drasekaran reported above mentions the problem of representing knowledge,
and it is related therefore to the symbol level. Now, it is certainly true that the
interaction problem exists at this level, but it seems plausible to assume that
its importance decreases at the knowledge level, to which the whole issue of
ontology belongs. Let us try for instance to re-state Bylander and Chan-
drasekaran’s statement at the knowledge level: “the knowledge required to
solve some problem is strongly affected by the nature of the problem...”. Put
in this way, it sounds even trivial. Notice however that this formulation
doesn’t refer to the way this knowledge is encoded, but simply to the rele-
vance relationship between the knowledge and the problem. In other words,
at the knowledge level the interaction problem reduces to the first of the two
“reasons” reported above. Of course, a specific piece of knowledge may be

1 In the following, I shall refer to this paper as “the paper”, and to its authors as “the
authors”.
more or less relevant for a particular task, but nothing tells us that this knowl-
edge is peculiar, specific of such task.
I will defend here the thesis of the independence of domain knowledge.
This thesis should not be intended in a rigid sense, since it is clear that – more
or less – ontological commitments always reflect particular points of view;
rather, what I would like to stress is the fact that reusability across multiple
tasks or methods should be systematically pursued even when modeling
knowledge related to a single task or method: the more this reusability is pur-
sued, the closer we get to the intrinsic, task-independent aspects of a given
piece of reality (at least, in the commonsense perception of a human agent).
In this systematic quest for reusability, the potential role of a discipline
like formal ontology appears evident. I have explored elsewhere [Guarino
1995] how a stronger connection between formal ontology, conceptual analy-
sis and knowledge engineering can contribute to establish the foundations of
the emerging field of “ontological engineering”. Following the lines of the
paper by van Heijst and colleagues, I shall discuss here how the principles of
ontological engineering can be used in the practice of knowledge-based sys-
tems building, focusing in particular on the interplay between ontologies and
problem-solving knowledge and on the ways to build and update ontologies.
I will first analyze in section 2 the various definitions of the term “ontology”
proposed by the authors, trying to make clear the problems bound to the for-
mal relationships between ontologies and conceptualizations. Then, in section
3, I will address the role of ontologies in the knowledge engineering process.
A crucial issue in this respect is the relationship between the ontology library
and the application ontology, and the role played by the latter in the update of
the former. The vision I will defend is that of application ontologies as spe-
cializations of a more general library, which includes task and method ontolo-
gies [Falasconi and Stefanelli 1994, Gennari et al. 1994] as well as domain
ontologies. The ontology-based knowledge modelling methodology proposed
by the authors will be discussed in detail in section 4, following their example
taken from the medical field. Finally, in the conclusions I will stress the role
of domain analysis, often absent in current methodological proposals where
the task analysis is strongly privileged.

2. Understanding Ontologies
2.1 Ontologies and Conceptualizations
Before discussing the principles for ontology libraries construction, the
authors report various definitions of the term "ontology" appeared in the lit-
erature, trying to establish a comprehensive definition. Together with Pier-
daniele Giaretta, I have analyzed this terminological problem in detail in
[Guarino and Giaretta 1995], focusing in particular on the possibility of giv-
ing a formal interpretation to the most cited definition of an ontology in the
knowledge sharing community, i.e. Gruber's definition:

(1) An ontology is an explicit specification of a conceptualization.

[Gruber 1994]

The main problem of this definition is that it is claimed to be based on the

formal notion of "conceptualization" introduced in [Genesereth and Nilsson
1987], while it can only be accepted in terms of an intuitive understanding of
that term. The origin of this problem, in my opinion, lies in the bad use of the
term "conceptualization" made by Genesereth and Nilsson.
It may be useful here to report some of the discussion appeared in
[Guarino and Giaretta 1995]. Let us consider the example given by Gene-
sereth and Nilsson. They take into account a situation where two piles of
blocks are resting on a table (Fig. 1a). According to them, a possible con-
ceptualization of this scene is given by the following structure:

<{a, b, c, d, e}, {on, above, clear, table}>

where {a, b, c, d, e} is the universe of discourse, consisting of the five

blocks we are interested in, and {on, above, clear, table } is the set of the
relevant relations among this blocks, of which the first two, on and above,
are binary and the other two, clear and table, are unary2. The authors make
clear that objects and relations are extensional entities. For instance, the table
relation, which is understood as holding of a block if and only if that block is
resting on the table, is just equal to the set {c, e}. It is exactly such an exten-
sional interpretation that originates our troubles.
Let us notice first that Genesereth and Nilsson used natural language
terms (like on, above) in the metalanguage chosen to describe a conceptuali-
zation. This could perhaps be seen as nothing more than a didactical device.
However, these linguistic terms do convey essential information in order to
understand the criteria used to consider some sets of tuples as the relevant re-
lations. Such an extra information cannot be accounted for by the conceptuali-
zation itself.

a c

b d a d

c e b e

(a) (b)

Fig. 1. Blocks on a table (from [Guarino and Giaretta 1995]).

(a) A possible arrangement of blocks.
(b) A different arrangement. Also a different conceptualization?

Referring to the example given, consider a different arrangement of

blocks, where c is on the top of d and a and b form a separate stack standing

2 In the original example also a function is considered, but we omit it here for the sake of
simplicity.
on the table (Fig. 1b). The corresponding structure would be different from
the previous one, generating therefore a different conceptualization. Of course
there is nothing wrong in such a view, if one is only interested in isolated
snapshots of the block world. But the meanings of the terms used to denote
the relevant relations are still the same, since they are invariant with respect to
the possible configurations of blocks. In fact, in the metalanguage adopted in
their book, Genesereth and Nilsson would adopt the same symbols (on,
above, clear, table) to denote the new conceptualization. We prefer to say in
this case that the states of affairs are different, but the conceptualization is the
same. The structure proposed by Genesereth and Nilsson seems to be more
apt to represent a state of affairs rather than a conceptualization.
In order to capture such intuitions, the linguistic terms we have used to
denote the relevant relations cannot be thought of as mere comments, informal
extra-information. Rather, the formal structure used for a conceptualization
should somehow account for their meaning. As the logico-philosophical lit-
erature teaches us, such a meaning cannot coincide with an extensional rela-
tion. In [Guarino and Giaretta 1995] we have presented a way to represent
this meaning in terms of an intensional structure inspired to Montague’s se-
mantics. According to this intensional interpretation, a conceptualization ac-
counts for the intended meanings of the terms used to denote the relevant re-
lations. These meanings are supposed to remain the same if the actual exten-
sions of the relations change due to different states of affairs. This means
that, for instance, the actual extensions of the relation on in the two examples
of Fig. 1a and 1b belong to the same conceptualization. Intuitively, we can
see a conceptualization as a set of informal rules that constrain the structure of
a piece of reality, which an agent uses in order to isolate and organize relevant
objects and relevant relations: the rules which tell us whether a certain block is
on another one remain the same, independently of the particular arrangement
of the blocks.

2.2 What are ontologies: a still debated issue

Hoping to have clarified the sense of the term "conceptualization", let us now
analyze the various definitions of "ontology" appearing in the paper by van
Heijst, Schreiber and Wielinga. Besides Gruber’s definition, they report two
more definitions taken from the literature:

(2) A (AI-) ontology is a theory of what entities can exist in the mind of a knowledgeable
agent.
[Wielinga and Schreiber 1993]

(3) An ontology for a body of knowledge concerning a particular task or domain describes
a taxonomy of concepts for that task or domain that define the semantic interpretation
of the knowledge.
[Alberts 1993]

The definition (2) is similar to the classical notion of ontological com-

mitment introduced by Quine [Quine 1961]3. According to him, a logical the-

3 At least, in the sense that the ontological commitment of a logical theory is intended as a
set of individuals. Expressions like “can exist in the mind” are however extraneous to
Quine.
ory is ontologically committed to the entities it quantifies over. As discussed
in [Guarino et al. 1994], such a notion however is too weak for our pur-
poses, since we want not only an account of what exists, but also an account
of the structure of what exists. This structure is implied in the language we
use: this is the reason why, as noticed by the authors, the term "ontology" is
often used as a synonym of "terminology" in the AI community.
The definition (3) is more problematic. Although Van Heijst and col-
leagues correctly observe that it is the semantic interpretation of the terms of a
domain that constitutes an ontology, the formulation reported is misleading,
since "the semantic interpretation of the knowledge ... concerning a particular
task or domain" doesn’t regard the taxonomy only, but it also involves the
factual situations holding in that domain. The distinction between domain
knowledge and domain ontology made by the authors (p. 12) is therefore not
caputred by this definition. Moreover, according to definitions (1) and (2), an
ontology can be much more than a taxonomy of concepts, involving in par-
ticular constraints and interrelations among concepts. Hopefully, it should
also concern more than one particular task or domain. Alberts’ definition
seems therefore both partial and inaccurate, and I cannot see how the authors
consider it as “not contradictory” with (1) and (2), coming up with the fol-
lowing “unifying” definition:

(4) An ontology is a explicit knowledge level specification of a conceptualization, (...)

which may be affected by the particular domain and task it is intended for.
[van Heijst et al. 1996]

Despite the difficulties of recognizing definitions (2) and especially (3) as

present in (4), this new formulation clarifies a little bit Gruber's definition
(under the assumption of the correct interpretation of "conceptualization" dis-
cussed above), stressing that ontologies belong to the knowledge level and
that they may depend on particular points of view. We must observe however
that it is exacly the degree of such dependence which determines the reusabil-
ity and therefore the value of an ontology.
There is another, nicer and more recent definition of ontologies proposed
by Tom Gruber in a message to the SRKB (Shared Reusable Knowledge
Bases) mailing list, reported in a recent work by Uschold and Gruninger
[Uschold and Gruninger 1996]:

(5) Ontologies are agreements about shared conceptualizations. Shared conceptualizations

include conceptual frameworks for modelling domain knowledge; content-specific pro-
tocols for communication among inter-operating agents; and agreements about the rep-
resentation of particular domain theories. In the knowledge sharing context, ontologies
are specified in the form of definitions of representational vocabulary. A very simple
case would be a type hierarchy, specifying classes and their subsumption relationships.
Relational database schemata also serve as ontologies by specifying the relations that
can exist in some shared database and the integrity constraints that must hold for them.
(Tom Gruber, 1994, SRKB Mailing list)

The nice thing of this formulation is that ontologies and conceptualiza-

tions are kept clearly distinct. An ontology in this sense is not a specification
of a conceptualization, but a (possibly incomplete) agreement about a con-
ceptualization. Therefore, as suggested in [Guarino and Giaretta 1995], we
can have different degrees of detail in this agreement depending on the pur-
pose of the ontology (see § 2.3). Formulation (5) agrees very well with our
refined version of (1):

(6) An ontology is an explicit, partial account of a conceptualization.

[Guarino and Giaretta 1995]

I consider this definition as quite satisfactory from my point of view.

Since it relies however on the revised notion of conceptualization discussed
above, it may result obscure for somebody. Hoping to clarify things more, I
would like to suggest the following further definition:

(7) An ontology is a logical theory that constrains the indended models of a logical lan-
guage.

To be precise, I refer here to the set of non-logical symbols (predicates

and functions) of a logical language (what is usally called the signature of the
language), used as “primitives” for a particular representation purpose. An
example of this signature is the set of symbols used by Genesereth and
Nilsson to denote what they call a conceptualization: {on, above, clear, ta-
ble}. An ontology in this case would provide the axioms which constrain the
meaning of these predicates, like, for example, ¬on(X,X).
Finally, there is still a last definition of ontology that the authors consider
as compatible with Gruber’s (and our) one:

(8) An ontology is an explicit, partial specification of a conceptualization that is ex-

pressible as a meta-level viewpoint on a set of possible domain theories for the pur-
pose of modular design, redesign and reuse of knowledge-intensive system compo-
nents.
[Schreiber et al. 1995]

In short, an ontology is considered in this case as “a meta-level descrip-

tion of a knowledge representation” (p. 10). In my opinion, this definition
introduces a source of confusion, due to the fact that the “meta-level view” is
considered by the authors as intrinsic to their notion ontology. Indeed, the
ontologies they have used in their work on KAKTUS [Wielinga et al. 1994]
and on the VT-domain [Schreiber and Terpstra 1996] are meta-level ontolo-
gies, since their domain is the meta-level domain of representation primitives.
However, the ontologies present in the core library built by Falasconi and
Stefanelli [Falasconi and Stefanelli 1994] can hardly be seen as “meta-level”.
In other words, ontologies can be either “meta-level” or not, depending
on the nature of their domain. In their experience on KAKTUS and the VT
domain, the authors have brilliantly shown how to use meta-level ontologies
for knowledge reuse purposes, exploiting mapping rules between an ontology
and another [Schreiber et al. 1995]; what they call “representational meta-
models” in the paper discussed here (p. 70) are again ontologies, developed
for the particular purpose of knowledge transformation: their domain is con-
stituted by the “types of expressions allowed in a knowledge representation
formalism”. It is important to remark here that these meta-level theories can be
still conceived as logical theories (see remark at the end of section 3.2).
2.3 Ontology kinds
I will now briefly comment the classification of ontology proposed by the
authors. They distinguish two dimensions, "the amount and type of structure
of the conceptualization and the subject of the conceptualization" (p. 11).
The first dimension is far from being clear. First of all, it is hard to see
how what they call "information ontologies" can be considered as ontologies
at all. A "specification of the record structure" of a database cannot be consid-
ered as an ontology according to the definition given by the authors, since it
belongs to the symbol level. A database schema can be seen as an ontology as
long as it is a conceptual database schema, while a logical database schema
belongs again to the symbol level. Level 1 of the PEN&PAD model [Rector et
al. 1993] can't be seen as an ontology since it describes factual knowledge
(medical records report "Observations - What the agents have heard, seen and
done"). Considering this as an ontology would violate the distinction made by
the authors between domain knowledge and domain ontology. Rather, what
consitutes an ontology is the vocabulary used to describe medical records,
but this collapses into what have been called “terminological ontologies”.
In turn, the distinction between terminological and knowledge-modelling
ontologies is also not clear. Due to the problems of the information ontolo-
gies, the contrast between them and knowledge-modelling ontologies is mis-
leading, and the meaning of the “richer internal structure” of the latter remains
vague. The reference to the level 2 of the PEN&PAD model increases the
confusion, since this seems to refer only to meta-level knowledge related to
the ways of observing and relating medical facts.
In conclusion, I believe that there is no reason to hypothesize a distinc-
tion among ontologies on the basis of “the amount and type of structure of
their conceptualization”. Maybe, as suggested above, a distinction can be
made among different ontologies on the basis of the degree of detail used to
characterize a conceptualization. A very detailed ontology gets closer to speci-
fying the intended conceptualization (and therefore may be used to establish
consensus about the utility of sharing a particular knowledge base which
commits to that ontology), but it pays the price of a richer language. A very
simple ontology, on the other hand, may be developed with particular infer-
ences in mind, in order to be shared among users which already agree on the
underlying conceptualization. We may distinguish therefore between docu-
menting ontologies and shareable ontologies, or maybe off-line and on-line
ontologies. Very simple ontologies like lexicons can be kept on-line, while
sophisticated theories accounting for the meaning of the terms used in a lexi-
con can be kept off-line.
The second dimension is much clearer: depending on the subject of the
conceptualization, the authors distinguish between application ontologies,
domain ontologies, generic ontologies and representation ontologies. Before
discussing in detail the relationships between the former three kinds in the
next section, I would like to comment here briefly on the notion of represen-
tation ontology. In this case, the underlying conceptualization addresses rep-
resentation primitives, like those defined in Ontolingua’s Frame Ontology
[Gruber 1993]. According to the discussion made in the previous section, a
representation ontology is therefore an example of meta-level ontology. I
must remark however that the citation to the work done together with Luca
Boldrin [Guarino and Boldrin 1993] about the supposed ontological neutrality
of such primitives is incorrect, since in that paper we argued against this neu-
trality, “which makes possible, for instance, to interpret arbitray unary predi-
cates either as classes or properties, and arbitrary binary predicates either as
slots or relations” (p. 2). In short, it is perfectly valid to adopt ontologically
neutral representation primitives to build a particular knowledge base, but to
build a reusable ontology it may be necessary to assign a more restricted se-
mantics to the representation primitives, taking into account the ontological
distinctions that can be made within unary and binary relations. This position
has been further discussed in [Guarino 1994, Guarino 1995], where I distin-
guished between a neutral epistemological level and a non-neutral ontological
level; ontological distinctions between unary primitives have been discussed
in [Guarino et al. 1994].

3. Ontologies in the Knowledge Engineering Process

3.1 The interaction problem
As mentioned in the introduction, van Heijst and colleagues postulate a strong
influence, in the ontology development process, of the particular application
at hand. However, the interaction problem does not hold to the same extent
for all concepts; they suggest therefore to distinguish between an ontology
library, that contains more or less reusable knowledge across different appli-
cations, and an application ontology, containing the definitions specific to a
particular application.
Surprisingly, they don’t introduce a method ontology, as done in
[Falasconi and Stefanelli 1994, Gennari et al. 1994]. Rather, they propose to
introduce two attributes, domain-specificity and method-specificity, “to de-
termine to what extent and under which circumstances a concept can be re-
used”. Once a large ontology library has been built, this indexing scheme can
surely simplify the construction of application ontologies; the key issue how-
ever regards the methodology used to update an incomplete ontology library
while building a particular application ontology.
The risk is to give too much importance to the interaction problem, con-
sidering a new concept introduced in the application ontology to be specific of
a certain domain and a certain method (i.e., of the application ontology at
hand), without making any attempt to generalize it in such a way to be reused
for more general tasks and domains. As mentioned in the introduction, in
fact, a concept may be relevant for a particular task whithout being necessarily
specific of that task.

3.2 Using application ontologies to update the ontology library

The risk mentioned above is especially evident when considering the method-
ology suggested by the authors for building and updating the ontology li-
brary. The key role in this process appears to be played by the application
ontology. The notion of application ontologies has been introduced in
[Gennari et al. 1994], for the purpose of i) reducing the gaps between domain
and method ontologies, and ii) allowing the domain expert to use the same
language adopted in the application at hand, which may be different from the
language used in the ontology library. In the work made by the PROTÉGÉ
group, the application ontology is mainly used to produce a tool used to
“populate” the application knowledge base, while in the paper by van Heijst
and colleagues the authors propose to exploit application ontologies also for
the task of updating the ontology library. In both cases, the construction of
the application ontology is mainly a “creative process”, with a very limited
support for what concern the content of the ontology itself. What distin-
guishes the two groups is the kind of link established between the application
ontology and the ontology library: in the PROTÉGÉ group, a method ontology
is intended to be part of the ontology library besides the domain ontology,
and the link with the application ontology is handled by explicit mapping rules
acting as “mediators”; in the KADS group this link is handled by an indexing
mechanism.
The former solution appears to me more powerful, since it makes explicit
the way the application ontology is related to the method ontology: a simple
indexing mechanism may be unsatisfactory for this purpose, since the choice
of the particular specificity index for a given concept remains obscure4. The
two solutions may be considered as roughly equivalent (as noticed indeed in
[Gennari et al. 1994]) if the purpose is to build an application ontology by
exploiting an existing ontology library, or to facilitate integration of different
representation formalisms (section 6); the matter is however completely dif-
ferent if we want to update the ontology library while building the application
ontology. This latter goal is of course highly desirable, as underlined by van
Heijst and colleagues (section 3.3), but it has been not addressed until now
due to its difficulty.
The hard issue is to limit the effects of the interaction problem, separating
the domain knowledge from the method knowledge. To this purpose, the
relevance relationship between domain concepts and methods must be cap-
tured. With the explicit introduction of a method ontology, this relevance re-
lationship can be represented by means of a “mapping relation” between the
application ontology and the method ontology, where the role played by each
single concept within a particular method is made explicit. In this way, the
effects of the interaction problem can be limited by representing the nature of
the interaction, rather than assuming its effects as intrinsic to the concepts
being modeled.
However, the technique based on mapping relations developed by the
PROTÉGÉ group is still limited for ontology building purposes, since it is
mainly based on a syntactic mapping. I believe that we can push further this
approach, seeing an application ontology as a specialization of both the do-
main and the method ontology.
Consider for example the concept cost appearing in the CASNET appli-
cation ontology reported by the authors (p. 26). It is not clear why it gets the
method-specificity “CASNET ranking”, and not the more general “ranking by
weight to cost ratio” reported in the method ontology shown at page 25. Pre-
sumably, the authors think it may be “dangerous” to assign a more general
meaning to such a concept, which is assumed to be dependent on the particu-
lar application. No attempt to generalize is foreseen by the proposed method-
ology in this phase, and the reusability of cost remains restricted to the
CASNET application.

4 By the way, van Heijst already use the technique of mapping rules for the task of knowl-
edge-based integration (section 6), and I do not see why they don’t use the the same tech-
nique to link the application ontology to the method ontology.
 A different conception of the application ontology is reported in Fig. 2.
The application ontology is built by specializing both the domain and the
method ontology. The concept CASNET-cost is the cost of an observation
leading to a pathophysiological state, which plays the role of the cost of an
hypothesis within the method “ranking by weight-to-cost-ratio”. What moti-
vates its presence in the application ontology is the fact that it plays a specific
role in CASNET’s ranking procedure. The ontological requirements of this
procedure are represented explicitly in the method ontology, and the
CASNET-specific cost satisfies the range restriction of the attribute has-
cost of the concept hypothesis belonging to the method ontology.

domain ontology task ontology

has-cost
pathophysiological state hypothesis cost

evidence-for

observation ranking by weight-to-cost

ratio
costs

cost
Ontology library

CASNET-
Hypothesis

costs

Application ontology
CASNET-cost

Fig. 2. Application ontology as a specialization of the ontology library. Thick arrows rep-
resents subsumption links.

According to this view, all concepts appearing in the application ontology

reported by the authors are specializations of both the domain ontology and
the method ontology5, and the “mapping rules” between the two ontologies
would be extremely simple. Focusing on the application ontology amounts to
highlighting those concepts which are relevant for a particular application,
being specializations of its method(s) and its domain: the application ontology
is just a view of the more general ontology.

5 More in general, any concept of the application ontology would be either a specialization
or an instance of a (meta)concept in the ontology library. Of course, this choice would im-
ply a richer structure both in the application ontology and the ontology library.
 Notice that, while the left part of Fig. 2 (the domain ontology) can be
considered as relatively static, the bottom and right parts change when the
problem solving strategy changes. In this way, the ISA arcs linking the appli-
cation ontology to the task ontology “can be seen as attributing context-
specific semantics to domain knowledge elements” ([Schreiber et al. 1995],
section 3.1). However, once the application ontology is fixed, it has a rigor-
ous model-theoretic semantics, in contrast with the approach based on syn-
tactical mapping relations discussed in [Schreiber et al. 1995].
In sum, I believe that the specific role played by single items of domain
knowledge into the decision-making process should be made explicit in the
application ontology. The indexing mechanism proposed by the authors ap-
pears to be to coarse for this purpose. As admitted by the authors (p. 25), it
makes the task of populating a largely incomplete ontology library by scoring
the newly defined concepts in the application ontology particulary difficult, or
almost impossible in presence of strong interaction problems.

4. An Example of Ontology-Based Modelling Method-

ology
I will briefly comment in the following the concrete example of a knowledge
modelling methodology sketched by the authors in section 5.1 and discussed
in section 7, in order to elucidate the ideas and the criticisms reported above.
In this example, I will assume the existence of two (imaginary) ontologies, a
domain ontology and a task and method ontology, built upon principles
slightly different from those adopted by the authors.

4.1 Informally describing the domain and the task

It is important here to isolate the domain andtaskvocabulary. Informal meth-
ods such concept maps {Gaines ...} may turn to be very useful.

4.2 Modelling the task

A suitable task and method ontology should supplement in my opinion the
“inference and task model” realized with QUITE. It is important that this on-
tology, accordingly to [Gennari et al. 1994], includes all the concepts neces-
sary to describe the inferential process, from the very abstract concepts related
to the inference scheme to the more specialized concepts specific for single
methods. For the sake of simplicity, I will call this ontology method ontol-
ogy.

4.3 Modelling the domain

This step is not present in the methodology proposed, since the authors as-
sume that a domain model already exists in the ontology library. However, a
phase in the modeling process where the basic structure of the domain is
analyzed seems to be as important as the task analyisis accomplished in the
previous step.
4.4 Building the application ontology
Here the authors propose a number of guidelines, presented more as heuristic
criteria than formal steps. The presence of a task ontology makes it possible
to specify these steps in a more rigorous way. We comment here some of the
steps reported by the authors, presenting a different modelling strategy.

Diagnostic hypotheses
Here me must find, in the domain ontology, the specializations of the concept
“hypothesis” (belonging to the method ontology) which are relevant for the
domain at hand. The method ontology imposes general constraints on such
concepts (say, an hypothesis must be a disorder). We look here at the domain
vocabulary. If we find a term suitable to be considered as an hypothesis, we
try to find it in the domain ontology, either by direct syntactic matching or by
means of suitable linguistic tools like thesauri (Wordnet, UMLS). If we don’t
find it, we may consider to introduce a definition for it, and to classify the
new concept in the domain ontology according to such definition. Then, we
must check whether this concept can be also classified as an “hypothesis”. If
this test fails, we must either change the definition of the newly created con-
cept or consider some other term as a candidate.
In the example given, the misleading term “syndrome” used in section
7.3.1 does not appear in the domain description of section 7.1. Sticking to the
originally elicited vocabulary helps therefore to avoid the introduction of un-
controlled terms. In fact, a simple linguistic analysis of the last two sentences
of section 7.1. allows us to conclude that the “therapeutic action” (which is
the goal of the task at hand) is driven by “the gradings of the lesions to each
of the systems”. The term “grading of a lesion” is therefore a good candidate
for an hypothesis6. Since “grading” is obviously an attribute of “lesion”, we
look for the main concept “lesion” in the domain ontology, which has, say,
the attribute “severity”, restricted to “grading”. We consider therefore
“severity of a lesion” as a candidate. But the severity of a lesion is nothing
else than a grading, i.e. a qualitative value. In the method ontology, the hy-
potheses of a diagnostic task are restricted to be “disorders”, and these are
disjoint from gradings. We exclude therefore “severity of a lesion”, and con-
sider the the possible specializations of “disorder”. Here we find “lesion”,
which admits any lesion of a particular severity as a subconcept. Since
“severity” is an attribute of “lesion”, and not a slot, all the lesions whith dif-
ferent severity are mutually exclusive due to the semantics of the representa-
tion primitives used (defined in the frame ontology). In conclusion, the hy-
potheses for the ARS applications are specializations of “lesion” (in fact,
“organ-system lesions”). Notice that no “lesion-subtype” relation is used; no-
tice also that “finding” is immediately excluded as a candidate since it does not
satisfy the restrictions on “hypothesis”.

Patient findings
Since the term “patient findings” appears explicitly in the task model, the cor-
responding concept belongs in my opinion to the method ontology and not to

6 We may use “lesion-grading”, but hyphenation may be misleading in this stage. The term
“grading of a lesion” makes clear what is the main concept and what is the attribute. See
[Guarino 1992].
the domain ontology as assumed by the authors (see however their note at
page 82). None of the terms used for the informal domain description (section
7.1) appears to be suitable as a candidate. The method ontology is thererore
used to elicit the concepts needed for the application ontology. As discussed
in the paper, particular expressions named “lesion-indications” are assumed to
be specializations of the concept “finding”.

Diagnostic data
The authors observe that “one aspect that distinguishes raw data from find-
ings in general is that data are directly observable”. This fact should be mod-
eled in the method ontology, which can be used therefore to elicit the concepts
related to diagnostic data in the application ontology. It is also important, in
my opinion, that these concepts reflect the information contained in the raw
data available for the application, without any implicit abstraction process. In
the example given, it seems to me a much better strategy to represent a single
datum as (ars-datum (erythema (location head-and-neck)
(degree 2))) rather than (ars-datum head-and-neck-
erythema = 2).Among other things, this choice blocks the possibility to
exploit general knowledge related to the location of a finding.

Diagnostic abduction
Due to the choice made when determining the diagnostic hypotheses, the
authors are not able to specialize the relation manifestation-of sup-
posed to exist in the domain ontology,since it holds for disorders while
ars-lesion-gradings have been defined as expressions. We don’t
have this problem, since - as we have seen - hypotheses are restricted to be
disorders by the method ontology. However, what deserves attention is the
way out adopted by the authors: they introduce an application-specific concept
called ars-manifestation-of, which is modification of manifesta-
[Link] this approach of modifying a concept as a result of a type
mismatch, introducing a new concept with a very similar name, seems to me
extremely dangerous. First, I believe that a rigorous naming discipline should
be part of the methodology. A very natural criterion in this respect is the fol-
lowing: any concept whose name is X-C should be a specialization of C8. It is
easy to see how violations to this criterion generate confusion and compro-
mise readability. Second, the introduction of an ad-hoc concept in the appli-
cation ontology which is not a specialization of an existing concept in the do-
main ontology violates the (refined) definition of application ontology that I
have proposed.

5. Conclusions
I will try here to summarize the observations made in this commentary
paper, giving at the same time an overall assessment of the main issues related
to ontology-based knowledge modelling.

7 By the way, how can an ARS-manifestation be a manifestation of an expression?

8 See [Guarino 1992] for a similar criterion applied to attributes, called attribute consis-
tency postulate: any X of a Y must be a X.
 First, I would say that ontologies can be of some help for building
knowledge-based systems if the interaction problem is not taken too seri-
ously. Fortunately, as I have argued in the introduction, this problem mainly
regards the symbol level, and does not affect the knowledge level too much.
Ontologies, on the other hand, need to be described at the knowledge level,
and sometime their full translation to the symbol level is not even necessary:
their purpose is to characterize a conceptualization, limiting the possible inter-
pretations of the non-logical symbols of a logical language in order to estab-
lish consensus about the knowledge described by that language. I hope to
have contributed to a clarification of the related meanings of “ontology” and
“conceptualization” in section 2.
In order to avoid the effects of the interaction problem, a greater empha-
sis to domain analysis should be given. In my opinion, the attention deserved
to domain analysis, conceived as an independent activity, should be greater or
equal to that devoted to task analysis. Confirming a tendence largely present
in the KA literature, the paper by van Heijst and colleagues gives in my
opinion too much importance to task analysis, avoiding however at the same
time to introduce an explicit task and method ontology. As shown with the
simple example reported in Fig. 2, an explicit representation of task and
method knowledge, along the lines of [Gennari et al. 1994] and [Falasconi
and Stefanelli 1994] can help to systematically analyze the knowledge roles
[McDermott 1988] played by the domain knowledge within a particular prob-
lem solving strategy, resulting in a very simple link between the application
ontology and the ontology library, aimed to maximize abstraction, reusability
and semantic coherence.
Suitable tools and techniques need still to be developed for domain analy-
sis, and for ontology building in general. The authors admit that “the creative
aspect of ontology construction” (i.e., that related to the content of ontology
itself) “remains a task for the user” (p. 49), and assume that a “largely com-
plete” ontology library already exists. This assumption however is far from
being satisfied in many cases, and the crucial task is exactly to build the on-
tology library. It is clear that in this case the vision of “Model-Based KA”
proposed by the authors (p. 30) must be abandoned in favour of “KA as
Modeling”: we cannot insist too much on model instantiation as a good strat-
egy when we don’t have good enough models.
Under this vision of “KA as Modeling”, domain-modeling tools need to
address content-related issues. This can be done by exploiting: i) linguistic
resources such as thesauri, and ii) analysis techniques based on formal onto-
logical principles.
I don’t understand why linguistic analysis is almost absent in the litera-
ture related to ontology building for knowledge-based applications (besides
the ontologies built for specific NL purposes, like PENMAN [Bateman et al.
1990], PANGLOSS [Knight and Luk 1994] or Mikrokosmos [Mahesh
1996]). If not a linguistic ontology, at least some on-line thesaurus like
Wordnet would be of great help for an ontology building tool, allowing at
the same time to i) pursue generality; ii) identify ambiguities and subtle differ-
ences in meaning; iii) enforce readability and consistency by means of lin-
guistic discipline.
These NL-based analysis techniques should be integrated by formal on-
tological principles. For example, questions related to the mereo-topological
structure and the dependence relationships holding for a particular concept or
individual should be systematically asked; I have shown elsewhere [Guarino
1992, Guarino et al. 1994, Guarino et al. 1994] how formal properties like
rigidity, countability, dependence can help a lot to clarify the ontological na-
ture of a concept.
In conclusion, the elicitation of the intrinsic structure of domain-
knowledge should be the main task of ontology-building tools. The goal of
so-called ontological engineering is to develop theories, methodologies and
tools suitable to elicit and organize domain knowledge in a reusable and
"transparent" way. This cognitive transparency is in my opinion the main
“added value” of an ontology.

Acknowledgements
This work has been done in the framework of a Special CNR Project on
ontological and linguistic tools for conceptual modelling (Progetto Coordinato
"Strumenti Ontologico-Linguistici per la Modellazione Concettuale”). I am
grateful to Pierdaniele Giaretta and Massimiliano Carrara for their precious
comments.
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