On Using Conceptual Data Modeling for Ontology Engineering

This paper tackles two main disparities between conceptual data schemes and ontologies, which should be taken into account when (re)using conceptual data modeling techniques for building ontologies. Firstly, conceptual schemes are intended to be used during design phases and not at the run-time of applications, while ontologies are typically used and accessed at run-time. To handle this first difference, we define a conceptual markup language (ORM-ML) that allows to represent ORM conceptual diagrams in an open, textual syntax, so that ORM schemes can be shared, exchanged, and processed at the run-time of autonomous applications. Secondly, unlike ontologies that are supposed to hold application-independent domain knowledge, conceptual schemes were developed only for the use of an enterprise application(s), i.e. “in-house” usage. Hence, we present an ontology engineering-framework that enables reusing conceptual modeling approaches in modeling and representing ontologies. In this approach we prevent application-specific knowledge to enter or to be mixed with domain knowledge. To end, we present DogmaModeler: an ontology-engineering tool that implements the ideas presented in the paper.