Information AboutDogma |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT DOGMA | |
| christian theology | |
| greek loanwords | |
| epistemology | |
| religious philosophy and doctrine | |
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DOGMA (Spyns et al., 2002, Jarrar et al., 2003, De Leenheer et al., 2007) is an Ontology approach and framework that is not restricted to a particular representation language. This approach has some distinguishing characteristics that make it different from traditional ontology approaches such as (i) its groundings in the linguistic representations of knowledge and (ii) the explicit separation of the conceptualisation (i.e., lexical representation of concepts and their inter-relationships) from its axiomatisation (i.e., semantic constraints). The goal of this separation, referred to as the double articulation principle (Spyns et al., 2002), is to enhance the potential for re-use and design scalability. This principle corresponds to an orthodox model-theoretic approach to ontology representation and development. Conceptualisations are materialised in terms of lexons. A lexon is a 5-tuple declaring either (in some context G): 1. taxonomical relationship (genus): e.g., < G, manager, is a, subsumes, person >; 2. non-taxonomical relationship (differentia): e.g., < G, manager, directs, directed by, company >. Lexons could be approximately considered as a combination of an RDF/OWL triple and its inverse, or as a conceptual graph style relation (Sowa, 1984). Next, we will elaborate more on the notions of context. LANGUAGE VERSUS CONCEPTUAL LEVEL Another distinguishing characteristic of DOGMA is the explicit duality (orthogonal to double articulation) in interpretation between the language level and conceptual level. The goal of this separation is primarily to disambiguate the lexical representation of terms in a lexon (on the language level) into concept definitions (on the conceptual level), which are word senses taken from lexical resources such as WordNet (Fellbaum, 1998). The meaning of the terms in a lexon is dependent on the context of elicitation (De Leenheer and de Moor, 2005). For example, consider a term “capital”. If this term was elicited from a typewriter manual, it has a different meaning (read: concept definition) than when elicited from a book on marketing. The intuition that a context provides here is: a context is an abstract identifier that refers to implicit and tacit assumptions in a domain, and that maps a term to its intended meaning (i.e. concept identifier) within these assumptions (Jarrar et al., 2003). ONTOLOGY EVOLUTION Ontologies naturally co-evolve with their communities of use. Therefore, in (De Leenheer et al., 2007) we identified a set of primitive operators for changing ontologies. We make sure these change primitives are conditional, which means that their applicability depends on pre- and post-conditions (Banerjee et al., 1987). Doing so, we guarantee that only valid structures can be built. CONTEXT DEPENDENCY TYPES In (De Leenheer and de Moor, 2005), we distinguished four key characteristics of context: (i) a context packages related knowledge: it defines part of the knowledge of a particular domain, (ii) it disambiguates the lexical representation of concepts and relationships by distinguishing between language level and conceptual level, (iii) it defines context dependencies between different ontological contexts and (iv) contexts can be embedded or linked, in the sense that statements about contexts are themselves in context. Based on this, we identified three different types of context dependencies within one ontology (intra-ontological) and between different ontologies (inter-ontological): articulation, application, and specialisation. One particular example in the sense of conceptual graph theory (Sowa, 1984) would be a specialisation dependency for which the dependency constraint is equivalent to the conditions for CG-specialisation (Sowa, 1984: pp. 97). Context dependencies provide a better understanding of the whereabouts of knowledge elements and their inter-dependencies, and consequently make negotiation and application less vulnerable to ambiguity, hence more practical. REFERENCES:
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