Epistemological problems in working with ontologies

The communication between agents does not only require the exchange of syntactically defined character strings. The agents also need to have a common knowledge background. AI-Research has been pursuing ontologies as an approach of formal language which can also be used to explicate knowledge backgrounds. Ontologies gain a particularly high practical relevance in the scope of the organizational knowledge management. Therefore information systems science has an increasing interest in ontologies. Based on a definition of the term ontology, this paper examines problems of the theory of knowledge and the theory of language, which might be created in the construction of ontologies. Ontologies are interpreted as it special case of conceptual models. Thus, the content of this paper can be applied not only to the strict framework ofontologies. but also to the problems of theory of science in the area of information modeling.