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.
