The word integration has been used with different
meanings in the ontology field. This article
aims at clarifying the meaning of the word “integration”
and presenting some of the relevant work
done in integration. We identify three meanings of
ontology “integration”: when building a new ontology
reusing (by assembling, extending, specializing
or adapting) other ontologies already available;
when building an ontology by merging several
ontologies into a single one that unifies all of
them; when building an application using one or
more ontologies. We discuss the different meanings
of “integration”, identify the main characteristics
of the three different processes and proposethree words to distinguish among those meanings:integration, merge and use
