In practice, most conceptual schemas of information systems and databases are developed essentially from scratch. This paper deals with a new approach to that development, consisting on the refinement of a general ontology. We identify and characterize the three activities required to develop a conceptual schema from a general ontology, that we call refinement, pruning and refactoring. The focus of the paper is on the differences of the new approach with respect to the traditional one. The pruning activity may be automated. We formalize it and present a method for its realization. Besides, we identify a particular problem that appears during the refactoring activity, determining whether two types are redundant, and provide two sufficient conditions for it. We illustrate the approach with the development of a conceptual schema by refinement of the Cyc ontology. However, our results apply to any general ontology. The conceptual modeling language we have used is the UML, but we believe that our results could be applied to any similar language.
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