The research is devoted to problems of perception of information in training, science, critical situations in the context of cognitive technologies. To consider semantics of subject domains when using cognitive technologies is one of problems of the digital environment. This problem is offered to be solved by attraction of specialized subject thesauruses. It is noted that during a digital era the role of specialized thesauruses as bases for ontology data presentation increases in information systems. On the basis of thesauruses it is easy to create ontology of a situation and to use it as model of data for cognitive agents.