Le terme et le concept : fondements d'une ontoterminologie

Most definitions of ontology, viewed as a "specification of a conceptualization", agree on the fact that if an ontology can take different forms, it necessarily includes a vocabulary of terms and some specification of their meaning in relation to the domain's conceptualization. And as domain knowledge is mainly conveyed through scientific and technical texts, we can hope to extract some useful information from them for building ontology. But is it as simple as this? In this article we shall see that the lexical structure, i.e. the network of words linked by linguistic relationships, does not necessarily match the domain conceptualization. We have to bear in mind that writing documents is the concern of textual linguistics, of which one of the principles is the incompleteness of text, whereas building ontology - viewed as task-independent knowledge - is concerned with conceptualization based on formal and not natural languages. Nevertheless, the famous Sapir and Whorf hypothesis, concerning the interdependence of thought and language, is also applicable to formal languages. This means that the way an ontology is built and a concept is defined depends directly on the formal language which is used; and the results will not be the same. The introduction of the notion of ontoterminology allows to take into account epistemological principles for formal ontology building.