UNDERSTANDING, BUILDING AND USING ONTOLOGIES

I defend here the thesis of the independence between domain knowledge and problem-solving knowledge, arguing against the dominance of the so -called ''inter action problem'' mentioned in a recent paper by Van He ijst, Schreiber and Wielinga to dispute the feasibility of a single do main ontology shared by a number of different applications. The main p oint is that reusability across multiple tasks or methods can and shou ld be systematically pursued even when modelling knowledge related to a single task or method. Under this view, I discuss how the principles of formal ontology and ontological engineering can be used in the pra ctice of knowledge engineering, focusing in particular on the interpla y between general ontologies, method ontologies and application ontolo gies, and on the role of ontologies in the knowledge engineering proce ss. I will then stress the role of domain analysis, often absent in cu rrent methodologies for the development of knowledge-based systems. (C ) 1997 Academic Press Limited.