ABSTRACT
Smith describes accurately the motivation and practice of ontology creation: It is not fair to claim that syntax is irrelevant, but the meaning we make of information is dependent upon more than its syntactic structure. It is this ontological notion of being-in-becoming that allows us to introduce the notion of culture to the study of ontology in information science. While this may be necessary to deal with the limitations of computational systems that function primarily as symbol processors, it also constrains one's ability to address the conceptual and semantic dimensions of ontology. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle describes ontology as regarding all the species of being qua being and the attributes which belong to it qua being. People try to abstract that experience in constructing ontology-as-category and cast it into a particular frame. The notion of schemas marks a shift away from the focus on deliberative and explicit cognitive processes, which mirror the ways they deal with language in cognition.
