The terms 'semantics' and 'ontology' are increasingly appearing together with 'explanation', not only in the scientific literature, but also in organizational communication. However, all of these terms are also being significantly overloaded. In this paper, we discuss their strong relation under particular interpretations. Specifically, we discuss a notion of explanation termed ontological unpacking, which aims at explaining symbolic domain descriptions (conceptual models, knowledge graphs, logical specifications) by revealing their ontological commitment in terms of their assumed truthmakers, i.e., the entities in one's ontology that make the propositions in those descriptions true. To illustrate this idea, we employ an ontological theory of relations to explain (by revealing the hidden semantics of) a very simple symbolic model encoded in the standard modeling language UML. We also discuss the essential role played by ontology-driven conceptual models (resulting from this form of explanation processes) in properly supporting semantic interoperability tasks. Finally, we discuss the relation between ontological unpacking and other forms of explanation in philosophy and science, as well as in the area of Artificial Intelligence.

翻译：“语义学”和“本体论”这两个术语正日益与“解释”一同出现，不仅在科学文献中，也在组织沟通中。然而，所有这些术语也都存在显著的过度负载现象。本文中，我们探讨它们在特定解释下的紧密关系。具体而言，我们讨论了一种称为“本体论解包”的解释概念，其旨在通过揭示符号领域描述（概念模型、知识图谱、逻辑规范）的本体论承诺（即依据其假定的真值制造者——本体论中使这些描述中的命题为真的实体）来解释它们。为阐明这一思想，我们运用一种关系的本体论理论来解释（通过揭示其隐藏语义）以标准建模语言UML编码的一个极其简单的符号模型。我们还讨论了本体论驱动的概念模型（源于这种解释过程的结果）在恰当支持语义互操作性任务中发挥的关键作用。最后，我们探讨了本体论解包与哲学、科学以及人工智能领域中其他解释形式之间的关系。