Dr. Tom Gruber' s (Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of Intraspect Software) Interview
For the Official Quarterly Bulletin of AIS Special Interest Group on Semantic Web and Information Systems, Volume 1, Issue 3, 2004
Tom Gruber (tomgruber.org) ，就是那个在 Ontology 最牛的牛，给 Ontology 下定义而被无数人引用的那个大牛，最近又说了一些很牛的话：
他说：”每个本体都是一个条约–一项社会要约–存在于想共享某些事物的人之间”（ “Every ontology is a treaty – a social agreement – among people with some common motive in sharing.” ）
他把 Ontology 分为形式化的、半形式化的和非形式化的，他认为形式化的本体会很难达成，会有很多限制，而半形式化的本体更有用，办形式化的本体：形式化的一半由机器来处理，半形式化部分给人读的。有意思。
The term “Semiformal Ontology” refers to a ontology which has a few bits of formality but is largely informal. It is the analog of what Tom Malone calls semistructured data, such as email or office forms. A semiformal ontology could support technology to processing of its formal parts but leaves it to the reader make sense of the informal parts.
Tom 认为 Ontology 工具（他的 Intraspec 公司正在干这个明堂）将对其应用带来很大便利，特别是对那些不懂技术的用户。
Tom 还认为半形式化本体由于能够结合上下文，会工作得很好。