TBox Concept

A TBox is a "terminological component" — a vocabulary associated with a set of facts or "assertions called the ABox.

The terms ABox and TBox are used to describe two different types of statements in ontologies. TBox statements describe a system in terms of controlled vocabularies, for example, a set of classes and properties. ABox are TBox-compliant statements about that vocabulary.

TBox statements tend to be definitional, such as a dictionary of words, or to establish structural relationships between concepts. TBox statements are sometimes associated with object-oriented classes and ABox statements associated with instances of those classes.

Together ABox and TBox statements make up a knowledge base.