The word 'ontology' has been used in philosophy for centuries.
But the following paper, which Pat Hayes wrote in 1978, seems
to be the first use of the word in artificial intelligence: (01)
http://www.issco.unige.ch/working-papers/Hayes-1978-35.pdf
Ontology for liquids (02)
I asked Pat if he knew of any earlier uses in AI, and he sent
the following reply. This article and two other articles that
Pat cites show the influence of philosophical ontology on AI. (03)
John (04)
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: The word 'ontology' in AI
Date: Sun, 3 Nov 2013 23:46:42 -0600
From: Pat Hayes (05)
As far as I recall, my use in the title of the 1978 paper was original.
I used it deliberately to suggest/imply that the KR problem in AI was
connected with philosophical ontology. (06)
The background to this was my reading Carnap's "Logical Structure of the
World" as an undergraduate, probably some time in 1964. Reading this
blew my mind and first got me excited about the idea of using logic to
describe the real world. When I got into AI and read McCarthy's
"Situations, actions and causal laws" (published 1963, I think I read it
in 1966), I was immediately struck by the similarity both of goals and
even in places of formal (what would now be called 'ontological')
techniques. A conversation with JMcC about this during a visit to
Edinburgh (where I was a grad student in 'machine intelligence' with
Donald Michie and Bernard Meltzer) is what led to him inviting me to
Stanford for the summer of 1967, when we wrote the paper "Some
philosophical problems..." (which *still* has the highest citation count
among all my publications :-) (07)
I wrote the "An ontology of liquids" and its companion paper "The naive
physics manifesto" while visiting the Dalle Molle institute in 1977-78,
and I was quite excited by them. I had private visions of creating a
revolution in AI, or at least AI in California. But they were like a
lead balloon. I got no feedback or response or communications at all, no
sign that anyone had even read them. It was quite depressing. (This was
pre-Web, of course, but there was some email contact between academics
using the early ARPAnet.) Then, about two years later, when I had just
about given up, I spent a few days at the MIT AI lab, at the time
considered to be the very world center of anti-logic, and to my surprise
discovered that there was a kind of inner cabal of grad students who
were very excited by my stuff. And then that inner cabal graduated and
spread over the planet. (08)
Pat (09)
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