  In the preface to his Cyclopaedia published in 1728 Ephraim Chambers offers
readers a systematized structure of his attempt to produce a universal
repository of human knowledge. Divided into an interconnected taxonomic tree
and domain vocabulary, this structure forms the basis of one effort from the
Metadata Research Center to study historical ontologies. The knowledge
structure is being encoded into a Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS)
form as well as a Web Ontology Language (OWL) version. This paper explores the
expressive and functional differences between these SKOS and OWL versions of
Chambers' knowledge structure. As part of this goal, the paper research focused
on the construction and application of rules in each system to produce a more
computationally ready representation of Chambers' structure in SKOS, which is
more thesaurus-like, and OWL, which represents additional ontological nuances.
First, studying the various textual aspects at the semantic, syntactic, and
typographic levels allowed for the relationships between terms to manifest from
which rules governing expression of the connections between elements developed.
Second, because each language, SKOS and OWL, functionally expresses different
logical relationships, their possibilities and limitations offer a ground for
further analyzing the resultant knowledge structures; although, each stemmed
from the same basic source of Chambers' text. Lastly this paper will examine
rule making and expression in light of Paul Grice's theory of conversational
implicature to understand how a naive agent formulates and applies these rules
to a knowledge structure.
