Thomas Gruber

He is Co-founder and CTO for Intraspect. At Stanford, he worked on standards for sharing ontologies and created technologies for knowledge sharing among computer programs (Ontolingua).

He authored Toward principles for the design of ontologies used for knowledge sharing (1992 then revised 1993). This paper discusses encoding bias and ontologies. It’s frequently cited in later papers on the same theme.

I’ve seen references that claim he was the first to popularize the term ontology as used in the AI world.