Recent work in Artificial Intelligence is exploring the use of formal ontologies as a way of specifying content-specific agreements for the sharing and reuse of knowledge among software entities. We take an engineering perspective on the development of such ontologies. Formal ontologies are viewed as designed artifacts, formulated for specific purposes and evaluated against objective design criteria. We describe the role of ontologies in supporting knowledge sharing activities, and then present a set of criteria to guide the development of ontologies for these purposes. We show how these criteria are applied in case studies from the design of ontologies for engineering mathematics and bibliographic data. Selected design decisions are discussed, and alternative representation choices and evaluated against the design criteria.

This paper describes an initial version of a library of sharable and reusable medical ontological theories, organized according to a proposed classification of ontologies. 1 1 What is an ontology? The term ontology arises from the philosophical tradition, within which it's typically polysemous [Poli, 1993]; that is, it presents multiple meanings. However, ontology can be generally defined as the doctrine of being or the science of objects (`real' objects as well as abstract, mental or ideal objects). While classical ontology is the result of "the intuitive study of the fundamental properties, modes, and aspects of being, or of entities in general", formal ontology is "the result of combining the intuitive, informal method of classical ontology with the formal, mathematical method of modern symbolic logic" [Burkhardt & Smith, eds., 1991]. There are analogies between the outlined philosophical notion of ontology and the knowledge engineering notion of conceptualization, as defined e.g...