Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface to the second edition
- Preface
- 1 An Introduction to Description Logics
- Part I Theory
- Part II Implementation
- Part III Applications
- 10 Conceptual Modeling with Description Logics
- 11 Software Engineering
- 12 Configuration
- 13 Medical Informatics
- 14 OWL: a Description-Logic-Based Ontology Language for the Semantic Web
- 15 Natural Language Processing
- 16 Description Logics for Databases
- Appendix: Description Logic Terminology
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - Conceptual Modeling with Description Logics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface to the second edition
- Preface
- 1 An Introduction to Description Logics
- Part I Theory
- Part II Implementation
- Part III Applications
- 10 Conceptual Modeling with Description Logics
- 11 Software Engineering
- 12 Configuration
- 13 Medical Informatics
- 14 OWL: a Description-Logic-Based Ontology Language for the Semantic Web
- 15 Natural Language Processing
- 16 Description Logics for Databases
- Appendix: Description Logic Terminology
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The purpose of the chapter is to help someone familiar with DLs to understand the issues involved in developing an ontology for some universe of discourse, which is to become a conceptual model or knowledge base represented and reasoned about using Description Logics.
We briefly review the purposes and history of conceptual modeling, and then use the domain of a university library to illustrate an approach to conceptual modeling that combines general ideas of object-centered modeling with a look at special modeling/ontological problems, and DL-specific solutions to them.
Among the ontological issues considered are the nature of individuals, concept specialization, non-binary relationships, materialization, aspects of part–whole relationships, and epistemic aspects of individual knowledge.
Background
Information modeling is concerned with the construction of computer-based symbol structures that model some part of the real world. We refer to such symbol structures as information bases, generalizing the term from related terms in Computer Science, such as databases and knowledge bases. Moreover, we shall refer to the part of a real world being modeled by an information base as its universe of discourse (UofD). The information base is checked for consistency, and sometimes queried and updated through special-purpose languages. As with all models, the advantage of information models is that they abstract away irrelevant details, and allow more efficient examination of both the current, as well as past and projected future states of the UofD.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Description Logic HandbookTheory, Implementation and Applications, pp. 377 - 401Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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