Conceptual Modeling with Description Logics

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 with 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. 10.1 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 ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: DLOG
• Authors: Alexander Borgida, Ronald J. Brachman
• Keywords: Automated Reasoning, Conceptual Modeling, DLOG 2003, Information Base, Information Models