  In the present paper, we argue that Terminological Knowledge Bases (TKB) are
all the more useful for addressing various needs as they do not fulfill formal
criteria. Moreover, they intend to clarify the terminology of a given domain by
illustrating term uses in various contexts. Thus we designed a TKB structure
including 3 linked features: terms, concepts and texts, that present the
peculiar use of each term in the domain. Note that concepts are represented
into frames whose non-formal description is standardized. Associated with this
structure, we defined modeling criteria at the conceptual level. Finaly, we
discuss the situation of TKB with regard to ontologies, and the use of TKB for
the development of AI systems.
