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Abstract. The purpose of TERMINAE is to help building an ontology, both from scratch and from texts, without control by any task. Requirements have been defined for a methodology on the basis of real experiments. TERMINAE fulfills these requirements, involving theoretical bases from linguistics and knowledge representation. Its strong points are integration of a terminological approach and an ontology management, precise definition of concept types reflecting modeling choices, and traceability facilities. This paper presents briefly the experiments leading to the requirements, and focuses on the tool and its underlying methodology. Practical and theoretical basis of TERMINAEIn what follows, we use the term "domain ontology", with the meaning of "ontology" in [33]: " An ontology is a hierarchically structured set of terms for describing a domain that can be used as a skeletal foundation for a knowledge base ". This definition seems to be totally compatible with that of [16]: " An ontology is a logical theory accounted for the intended meaning of a formal vocabulary, i.e. its ontological commitment to a particular conceptualization of the world ". We use also the same distinction between top-level ontology, domain ontology, task ontology and application ontology as in [16]. We agree too with Guarino's definition of a knowledge base as being obtained by specialization of an ontology to a particular state of the world.In TERMINAE, the computer-aided tool presented in this paper, we often use the term "knowledge base" for "ontology of a generic knowledge base" because what we speak about is always state-independent, and the term "ontology management" is not yet widely used. TERMINAE is used as an "ontology management" tool, even if its representation language allows the description of facts by individual concepts.

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