Review of Components of an Ontology

This is a review of the paper entitled Components of an Ontology, by Phil Lord.

This paper describes the three main components that can be found in an ontology (classes, instances, relations). Therefore it should be of interest to any newcomer to ontology development, as the confusion of which entities to use (especially instance vs. class) is a major problem when learning how to develop an ontology.

There is a difficult sentence at the end of introduction: “These components can be separated into two kinds; those that describe the Entities of the domain being described, and those which either enable the use of the ontology or describe the ontology itself.” There is no more references to such distinction in the rest of the paper. Also, it is not clear what are the components that describe the entities of the domain (axioms, individuals, classes?), the components that enable the use of the ontology (editors, APIs?) and the components that describe the ontology (metadata, metamodelling?).

The whole paper, although it describes general ontological components, has an OWL flavour, and the author should be explicit about it.

I would change the example for illustrating existential/universal, to an example where the class and the filler are different entities (not person/person), to make it more understandable.

I recommend accepting this paper.