Human knowledge is made up of the conceptual structures of many communities of interest. In order to establish coherence in human knowledge representation, it is important to enable communication between the conceptual structures of different communities The conceptual structures of any particular community is representable in an ontology. Such a ontology provides a formal linguistic standard for that community. However, a standard community ontology is established for various purposes, and makes choices that force a given interpretation, while excluding others that may be equally valid for other purposes. Hence, a given representation is relative to the purpose for that representation. Due to this relativity of representation, in the larger scope of all human knowledge it is more important to standardize methods and frameworks for relating ontologies than to standardize any particular choice of ontology. The standardization of methods and frameworks is called the semantic integration of ontologies.

翻译：人类知识由众多兴趣社区的概念结构构成。为了建立人类知识表征的一致性，促进不同社区概念结构之间的沟通至关重要。任何特定社区的概念结构均可通过本体来表征。该本体为该社区提供了形式化的语言标准。然而，标准社区本体是为多种目的而建立的，其选择会强制赋予特定解释，同时排除其他可能同样适用于其他目的的解释。因此，特定表征相对于其表征目的而具有相对性。由于这种表征的相对性，在整个人类知识的更广范围内，标准化关联本体的方法与框架比标准化任何特定本体选择更为重要。这种方法与框架的标准化被称为本体的语义集成。