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Hi,
Here's the comments I've had from a single read through your paper. I will add some more as I go on.
Abstract
> In this entry, I first introduce the notion of ontology in such a manner as to not only give a high level understanding of what ontology is and of what practice importance it has but also to appeal to the intuitions of the reader about representation of knowledge.
Wordy sentence.
Introduction
> Let me begin with the following remarks from a philosophical discussion
Not sure first person voice is appropriate for the article. Repeats.
> I duly admit that I am glossing over the subtleties in the original context.
I think disclaimers should be more objective, e.g. "This page may not comprehensively capture the subtleties..."
> science researches
Is "researches" a correct term? I've never seen plral form of research.
Characteristics of Ontology
> which correspond to things construed as types, rather than as tokens.
What's the difference between types and tokens?
> To move on to the second point, namely kinds of and levels of abstraction of terms, the discussion so far may have given the impression that all representation scheme operate at the same level of abstraction with respect to other systems
Wordy sentence.
> Conceptions of Truth: What to Represent
This part does not seem to motivate the formal language expression of ontology. I see the philosophical discussion about truth is very interesting, but it might be too high level for the scope of the article.
> To use an example similar to Russel and Norvig [6], a semantic network might have a node "Fido", which is connected to another node "Dog" by an edge labeled with "MemeberOf", the latter, in turn, to the node "Canidae" by the relation of subset. In particular, the construction is to be expressed in description logic sentences.
An image accompanying this example would be nice.
Connection of Ontology to Probabilistic Models
> My presentation here is only for the purpose of giving a rough idea about how ontology might lend itself to probablistic interpretations and, as such, neither describes his approach in entirety (in particular, I skip the discussion of conditional probability) nor includes all details and subtleties.
Same point about disclaimers and wordiness.
This is not full response to all of your points. Let me reply for now at least to some of the points (sorry, not necessarily in the order of your list).
1) The expression "wordy" is rather subjective; in particular, precision in expressions as well as grammatical considerations, such as parallelism, sometime do require "long" sentences -- for instance, legal documents. To be sure, this is not to say all of my sentences are carefully crafted, and some of them could be reworded, which I will work on. I would add that you should use sentences to explain your views fully; otherwise, it sounds as if you are stating your personal opinions, which I am not obliged to agree.
2) I would say that the discussion about truth is relevant in that ultimately we want to capture truth about the world in our representations of domains. (Does not science have a similar goal?) Note that the relationship between human-devised systems -- be they physics, natural languages, or knowledge bases -- and what things are in the world is not simple; it seems that there is no necessity that such systems somehow fit to things in the world. Concepts and real things are in nature very different. We simply say in logical deduction that a conclusion reached by inference is true or false, but what do you mean by the word "true"? How can you be sure that sentences you use actually reflect what things are in the world and on that ground are true? I want to see the process from conceptualization to knowledge representation and artificial intelligence systems in particular. Realism and correspondence theory of truth, which are expressed in the Smith's remarks, are fundamental for ontology; I would not describe it as "high level" discussion. That being my response, however, I could state more explicitly why I think that it is relevant.
3) I am not sure if the type and token distinction is technical; synonyms for these two words are kinds and instances. When I write number 2 on a blackboard, that is a token of the type number 2. The explanation in terms of type and token is my paraphrase of the original passage. People might say somehting to the effect that "as a token of my gratitude (or appreciation),...".
4) Regarding my use of the first person in the exposition, I know that the convention is to use an objective tone in reports. I would say, however, rhetorical (here in a derogatory sense) words I might use do not make the content any more objective and unbiased. (Just think of glib, pompous talks by politicians or lawyers, with little substance.) One should judge the worth of a report on grounds of the substance, namely the argument and evidence. At any rate, given that I am the sole author, whose opinion could it be if not mine?
5) The word "researches" is actually correct. See for instance https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/research It says that is a British convention. But to my ears, generally words seem to have a different nuance when used in plural.
6) I think that you might be right about graphical representation, generally speaking; there is a figure in a paper I was thinking to add to give an idea about what ontology might look like. However, insofar as that particular example is concerned, I do not think a pictorial representation adds anything. I explicitly say there are nodes and edges in the graphical representation. In fact there are only 3 nodes. The relations of membership and subset can go only in one direction, so that edges are directed. Fido is a dog's name. So Fido is a dog. Canidae is a family, to which dogs belong. So, you know which direction the edges point. I am not sure what is not clear here, to be honest. What is the ambiguity you are concerned about?