Managing Ontological Constraints
Yannis Kalfoglou, David J. Robertson · ePrints Soton (University of Southampton) · 1999
We explore the use of ontological constraints in a new way: deploying them in a software system's formal evaluation. We present a formalism for ontological constraints and elaborate on a meta interpretation technique in the field of ontologies. Ontological constraints often need enhancements to capture application-specific discrepancies. We propose an editing system that provides guidance in building those constraints and we explain how this helps us to detect conceptual errors that reflect a misuse of ontological constructs. We describe a multilayer architecture for performing such checks and we demonstrate its usage via an example case. We speculate on the potential impact of the approach for the system's design process. 1