The Use of Ontologies for Knowledge Acquisition

Ontologies are explicit conceptualisations of subject domains, and this chapter examines the use and value of ontologies for knowledge acquistion. It takes three approaches to the exploitation of ontologies, and examines them critically with respect to a number of issues, such as task-relativity, or the aim of providing tools and techniques that can be used (semi-)independently of knowledge engineers. We illustrate these ideas with four systems which exploit or could exploit ontological insights in the context of knowledge acquisition.