The term unification is meaningful only with respect to applications. A term's meaning, or semantics, is evident in its use - if the application is successful, the terms have been used correctly. Unifying academic ontologies is unification in a vacuum. The only way to know if we have done it correctly is to test whether the applications associated with the terms interoperate successfully - a notion called pragmatic semantic unification. Ontologies should refer to applications, and unification success should be tested with interoperability.
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Charles Petrie (2005) studied this question.
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