Abstract
As a general science of the universe dealing with the most universal truths about all existence, an account of what there is in the world and the study of reality with its content, ontology has long had a critical import only for a small set of professionals. For the majority of researchers, not mentioning the non-committed people, it has been the realm of the occult, an esoteric domain of discourse, the region of most abstract reasoning, or the sphere of philosophical opinion. Today the field is rapidly increasing its audience and practical value. Maybe only a few people will call into question the importance of world models for such advanced knowledge domains as information sciences and computing technology. Increasingly, the universal science is identified with the life and soul of knowledge technologies and intelligent systems. The search for the world description standard as an exhaustive theoretical account and model of generic entities is becoming a research activity promising unprecedented advancements in the new cross area of science and technology. Particularly, this is important for creating knowledge systems of extraordinary performance, such as the emerging Semantic Web, implying the entire gamut of novel applications: knowledge management, intelligent databases, conceptual/semantic search and retrieval, software agents, speech and natural language understanding, e-commerce, and ubiquitous computing (Semantic Web Topic Hierarchy, 2007; Semantic Web Technology, 2007). Considering these design purposes, there are several technical requirements for building an ontology standard: expressivity, efficiency, scalability, compatibility, extensibility, and relative simplicity. But the most significant prerequisite appears to be its consistency with existent commonsense models of the world and scientific learning.