Conceptual Analysis and Ontological Modelling in Information Systems

With Web 2.0, the creation of digital content using all types of media accelerated as a result of increasing Internet accessibility, social communities who share and collect information as well as improved applications allowing everyone to become a producer. The current usage of tags and asynchronous linking provides a means to reveal some basic structural elements within the vast 'repositories of knowledge' and generally in the seemingly endless proliferation of data but ignores the needs of (basic) users with respect to differentiate expert knowledge from 'data' (opinion, unverified reports, and other material disguised amateurish gossip and musings. Users wish to retrieve precise results on questions asked in imprecise natural languages, and to overcome any cultural or language barrier, or to extract additional information such as context, temporal relationships, concept interconnectedness, and alternative media documents representing like content. The next generation of the Web is called 3.0 and is supposed to be 'intelligent' in that it emphasizes machine-facilitated understanding of information by incorporating , for example, semantic networks, machine learning, autonomous agents, artificial intelligence and distributed databases. Of especial importance is the 'un-derstanding' of content by applications, requiring agents to operate autonomously, and the provision of service oriented architectures where missing components are automatically searched for and integrated and provided via a natural interface to the user. One popular approach for progressing issues relating to concept 'understand-ing' being used in recent times is ontology based. Ontologies are an explicit, formal specification of common conceptual classification schemes and generally describe a hierarchy of concepts using a subsumption relation. From a theoretic understanding , ontologies also describe semantic relations between concepts allowing