The number of papers written on ontologies has increased considerably over the last twenty years. This trend can be easily observed by searching words like “ontology” or “thesaurus” in databases. Despite this fact, there hasn’t been a consensus about the significance of this concept. The graphical representation known as ontology spectrum must have generated a lot of confusion amongst readers. In this paper we argue that this confusion is due to the mix of the various types of knowledge organization systems with distinct objectives in the same graphical representation. Thus, constructing a formal ontology for a system does not always presume an improvement, frequently it is adequate with less complex representations
