•Philosophy: “a particular
system of categories accounting for a certain
vision of the world” or domain of discourse, a conceptualization (Big O)
•Artificial
Intelligence: “an engineering product
consisting of a specific vocabulary
used to describe a part of reality, plus a set of explicit assumptions regarding the intended meaning
of the vocabulary words”, “a specification of a conceptualization” (Little
O)
•Ontological
Engineering: towards a formal, logical theory, usually
‘concepts’ (i.e., the entities, usually classes hierarchically structured in a special subsumption
relation), ‘relations’, ‘properties’, ‘values’,
‘constraints’, ‘rules’, ‘instances’