One of the mots difficult problems in knowledge base design is the acquisition and formalization of an expert's rules concerning a special universe of discourse in most cases different experts and the knowledge base designer himself will use different terminologies and will represent rules concerning the same objects in a different way therefore one of the firs steps in knowledge base design has to be the con struction of an integrated commonly accepted terminology that can be shared by all persons involved in the design process this design step will be the topic of the paper proposes concepts methods and tools to support the extraction integration transformation and evaluation of terminological knowledge that are based on database design techniques and discusses the possibilities and limitations of automating these.