In any case, if machines could acquire conceptual knowledge with the same facility as humans, then AI would be much better off. Davis, Shrobe and Szolovits list five important roles played by a representation, and argue that keeping all five in mind provides a broad perspective that can shed light on some long-standing disputes. The passage quoted in the introduction can be found at page 19. Ontologies and Electronic Commerce . Edited by Dieter Fensel.
Ontologies provide support in integrating heterogeneous and distributed information sources.
Ontologies enable machine-understandable semantics of data, and building this data infrastructure will enable completely new kinds of automated services. Towards a Standardization of Multi-Agent System Frameworks . Ontologies are defined as specification schemes for describing concepts and their relationships in a domain of discourse. It is important that agents not only have ontologies to conceptualize a domain, but also that they have ontologies with similar constructions. Formal Ontology in the Information Technology.