[Sigia-l] Question about the use of the term 'ontology'

[ruth at ruthkaufman.com]

Background:
I'm writing a project definition document for a project concerning the
development of standards for product descriptions. A full set of standards may
include editorial guidelines, presentation standards, interaction patterns, an
XML schema or DTD, policies, controlled vocabularies -- anything that everyone
in the organization must enable or comply with in order to make product
descriptions sharable among systems and rendered consistently for users. I
anticipate that we'll need to create or modify some controlled vocabularies.
These may be corporate taxonomies, allowed values lists, or some other kind of
-something-.

Question:
Is 'ontology' the overarching term here for 'words for kinds of things'? I
basically need one generic, all encompassing term to cover strict taxonomies
and other kinds of controlled vocabularies and lists of things. In this post,
I've used 'controlled vocabularies', but I have a vague recollection that this
refers to something specific and isn't the best overarching term (or is it?). I
have another notion that controlled vocabularies and taxonomies simply reify
ontologies, in which case ontology wouldn't really be the right category
heading... unless there are two meanings for 'ontology' -- one philosophical
and one used by IT & knowledge workers. Any suggestions?

Thanks!
Ruth