s. The Plinius ontology was developed to support the translation of natural-language sentences into expressions in a knowledge representation language [31]. Those design decisions taken during the development of the ontology which appeared to be domain-independent have been proposed as general ontology development principles. These are: (1) conflicting assertions about the same entity can be more readily discovered if the concepts are defined as fully as possible. (2) pre-existing formal theories are taken as given and a domain ontology does not specify the semantics of logical constants. (3) an ontology should be independent of any particular knowledge representation language. (4) the principle of the conceptual construction kit states that an ontology consists of primitives concepts and construction rules that allow the definition of all other concepts in terms of these primitives. (5) a bottom-up approach is taken in order that the ontology exhibits sufficient completeness for the...

This is the second of a two-part paper to review ontology research and development, in particular, ontology mapping and evolving. Ontology is defined as a formal explicit specification of a shared conceptualization. Ontology itself is not a static model so that it must have the potential to capture changes of meanings and relations. As such, mapping and evolving ontologies is part of an essential task of ontology learning and development. Ontology mapping is concerned with reusing existing ontologies, expanding and combining them by some means and enabling a larger pool of information and knowledge in different domains to be integrated to support new communication and use. Ontology evolving, likewise, is concerned with maintaining existing ontologies and extending them as appropriate when new information or knowledge is acquired. It is apparent from the reviews that current research into semi-automatic or automatic ontology research in all the three aspects of generation, mapping and evolving have so far achieved limited success. Expert