Ontology versus terminology, from the perspective of ontologists

Abstract

According to research teams’ experiments in ontology engineering field, building ontologies is much more time-consuming and costly than building terminologies with regard to ontology complexity and formality, two major differences between these types of resources. In the meantime, there are already many consensual terminologies for numerous knowledge domains available on the web, consequently these knowledge representations can constitute a great contribution in saving time and money in ontology building process field since terminologies can be considered as preliminary attempts to model particular domains by their respective experts. Though before performing such a reuse, it is essential to distinguish clearly which type of resource we are dealing with and therefore decide for its suitability for our purposes or not. This paper will focus on two leading points: on the one hand, a comparison between ontology and terminology on the basis of several features such as: basic principles, methodological aspects and formality perspective and on the other hand, an overview of terminology reuse in ontology building process throughout some successful reuse cases.