Applying Ontologies to Terminology: Advantages and Disadvantages

This paper aims at discussing the main advantages that ontologies bring to the field of terminology and its users, focusing on different aspects and needs. Throughout the paper ontologies are acknowledged as a valuable resource to improve quality of terminological projects as well as the content of terminologies, but it also seems appropriate to define the concept of ontologies more precisely and to outline their benefits and limitations. To do so, we firstly discuss the multidisciplinarity of ontologies and the main recent uses within different disciplines. Secondly, we focus on terminology studies and theories and depict the evolution of this resource in the terminology field during the last decades, which has brought about the appearance of new methodologies and applications. Next, we put forward the advantages that ontologies bring to terminology in general and to several linguistic phenomena in particular (multidimensionality, for example) so as to shed some light on their importance in this field and, finally, we conclude with the discussion of significant drawbacks encountered, along with some final remarks about the use of ontologies in terminology work.