A Structuralistic Approach to Ontologies

It is still an open question how the relation between ontologies and their domains can be fixed. We try to give an account of semantic and pragmatic aspects of formal knowledge by describing ontologies in terms of a particular school in philosophy of science, namely structuralism. We reconstruct ontologies as empirical theories and interpret expressions of all ontology language by semantic structures of a theory. It, turns out. that. there are relevant aspects of theories Which cannot as Yet be taken into consideration in knowledge representation. thus provide the basis for extending the concept of ontology to a theory of the use of a language ill a community.