A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specifications

Tom Gruber's 1993 article, published in the journal Knowledge Acquisition, coined the definition of ontology that's still cited most often in AI and knowledge representation: "an explicit specification of a conceptualization." The article describes Ontolingua, a system for making ontologies portable across different representation formats, and laid the groundwork for how ontology work is done in computer science and AI. Freely available as a PDF via the author's own website.