An enriched knowledge model for formal ontological analysis
Valentina A. M. Tamma, Trevor J. M. Bench-Capon · 2001
This paper presents and motivates an extended ontology knowledge model which explicitly represents semantic information about concepts. This knowledge model is grounded on the meta-properties of formal ontological analysis and it results from enriching the usual conceptual model with semantic information which precisely characterises the concept's properties and expected ambiguities, including which properties are prototypical of a concept and which are exceptional, the behaviour of properties over time and the degree of applicability of properties to subconceptsThis enriched conceptual model permits a precise characterisation of what is represented by class membership mechanisms and helps a knowledge engineer to determine, in a straightforward manner, the meta-properties holding for a concept. Meta-properties are recognised to be the main tool for a formal ontological analysis that allows building ontologies with a clean and untangled taxonomic structure. Moreover, this enriched semantics facilitates the development of reasoning mechanisms on the state of affairs that instantiates the ontologies. Such reasoning mechanisms can be used in order to solve ambiguities that can arise when ontologies are integrated and one needs to reason with the integrated knowledge.