Domain Knowledge Representation: Using an Ontology Language

摘要

We have been engaged in a software engineering projectrncalled Eagle, which was aimed at knowledge based automaticalrngeneration of information systems. In this project,rnwe have developed a software called PROMIS (PROtotypingrnManagement Information Systems) for generating informationrnsystems automatically. The work of PROMISrnwas relying upon a large scale domain knowledge base. Forrnconstructing this knowledge base, we have designed a newrnknowledge architecture which is a combination of objectrnand ontology. We call our approach as ontology orientedrn(ONO). It has proved to possess many advantages versusrnthe traditional approach which is based on objects only. Butrnin the Eagle project we have programmed a big variety ofrndifferent ontology structures without standard constructionrnrules. The lack of standard architecture adds dif￡culty tornontology design and implementation. The contribution ofrnthis paper is to introduce type concepts for ontologies andrnto design an ontology language Ontodom with four basicrnontology types. We have shown that a subtyping mechanismrnis powerful enough to produce the big variety of domainrnontologies with help of the four basic ontology typesrnof Ontodom. A case study is given. And at last, comparativerndiscussions are given from the angles of ONO withrnother (structured and object-oriented) approaches and ofrnOntodom with other ontology representations.