The role of common ontology in achieving sharable, reusable knowledge bases

Although AI research and commercial system development depend on bodies of formally represented knowledge that are expensive and difficult to construct, current knowledge base design does not support the accumulation or reuse of such knowledge. This paper presents a strategy for building libraries of sharable, reusable knowledge in which common ontologies play a central role as a knowledge coupling construct. Ontologies are defined as coherent sets of representational terms, together with textual and formal definitions, that embody a set of representational design choices. Problems in the design of sharable ontologies are identified. Research and development in AI is impeded by an inability to share and reuse knowledge bases. The expense of building serious knowledge bases and the lack of means to exchange them with colleagues makes it difficult to generate, evaluate, and build on research results which depend on "domain theories" or "background knowledge." Similarly, commerci...