Sharing Knowledge: Starting with the Integration of Vocabularies

This paper addresses the knowledge sharing problem from an operational perspective: how and when can one use somebody else's knowledge. It proposes the implementation of some control mechanism over the knowledge acquisition process. This limits the expressiveness of the notation but will improve the shareability of knowledge structures among different but related knowledge domains. This control mechanism is based on the construction and use of a part-of hierarchy built with the descriptions of the terms composing the vocabulary.