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In information science a conceptualization is an abstract simplified view of some selected parts of the world, containing the objects, concepts, and other entities that are presumed of interest for some particular purpose and the relationships between them. An explicit specification of a conceptualization is an
ontology Ontology is the philosophical study of existence, being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of realit ...
, and it may occur that a conceptualization can be realized by several distinct ontologies. An ''
ontological commitment Ontology is the philosophical study of being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of reality and every ...
'' in describing ontological comparisons is taken to refer to that subset of elements of an ontology shared with all the others. "An ontology is ''language-dependent''", its objects and interrelations described within the language it uses, while a conceptualization is always the same, more general, its concepts existing "independently of the language used to describe it". The relation between these terms is shown in the figure to the right. Not all workers in
knowledge engineering Knowledge engineering (KE) refers to all aspects involved in knowledge-based systems. Background Expert systems One of the first examples of an expert system was MYCIN, an application to perform medical diagnosis. In the MYCIN example, the ...
use the term "conceptualization", but instead refer to the conceptualization itself, or to the ontological commitment of all its realizations, as an overarching ontology.


Purpose and implementation

As a higher level abstraction, a conceptualization facilitates the discussion and comparison of its various ontologies, facilitating knowledge sharing and reuse. Each ontology based upon the same overarching conceptualization maps the conceptualization into specific elements and their relationships. The question then arises as to how to describe the "conceptualization" in terms that can encompass multiple ontologies. This issue has been called the
Tower of Babel The Tower of Babel is an origin myth and parable in the Book of Genesis (chapter 11) meant to explain the existence of different languages and cultures. According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language migrates to Shin ...
problem, that is, how can persons used to one ontology talk with others using a different ontology? This problem is easily grasped, but a general resolution is not at hand. It can be a "bottom-up" or a "top-down" approach, or something in between. However, in more artificial situations, such as information systems, the idea of a "conceptualization" and the "ontological commitment" of various ontologies that realize the "conceptualization" is possible. The formation of a conceptualization and its ontologies involves these steps: * specification of the conceptualization * ontology concepts: every definition involves the definitions of other terms * relationships between the concepts: this step maps conceptual relationships onto the ontology structure * groups of concepts: this step may lead to the creation of sub-ontologies * formal description of ontology commitments, for example, to make them computer readable An example of moving conception into a language leading to a variety of ontologies is the expression of a process in
pseudocode In computer science, pseudocode is a description of the steps in an algorithm using a mix of conventions of programming languages (like assignment operator, conditional operator, loop) with informal, usually self-explanatory, notation of actio ...
(a strictly structured form of ordinary language) leading to implementation in several different formal computer languages like
Lisp Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...
or Fortran. The pseudocode makes it easier to understand the instructions and compare implementations, but the formal languages make possible the compilation of the ideas as computer instructions. Another example is mathematics, where a very general formulation (the analog of a conceptualization) is illustrated with "applications" that are more specialized examples. For instance, aspects of a
function space In mathematics, a function space is a set of functions between two fixed sets. Often, the domain and/or codomain will have additional structure which is inherited by the function space. For example, the set of functions from any set into a ve ...
can be illustrated using a
vector space In mathematics and physics, a vector space (also called a linear space) is a set (mathematics), set whose elements, often called vector (mathematics and physics), ''vectors'', can be added together and multiplied ("scaled") by numbers called sc ...
or a
topological space In mathematics, a topological space is, roughly speaking, a Geometry, geometrical space in which Closeness (mathematics), closeness is defined but cannot necessarily be measured by a numeric Distance (mathematics), distance. More specifically, a to ...
that introduce interpretations of the "elements" of the conceptualization and additional relationships between them but preserve the connections required in the
function space In mathematics, a function space is a set of functions between two fixed sets. Often, the domain and/or codomain will have additional structure which is inherited by the function space. For example, the set of functions from any set into a ve ...
.


See also

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Knowledge representation and reasoning Knowledge representation (KR) aims to model information in a structured manner to formally represent it as knowledge in knowledge-based systems whereas knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, or KR²) also aims to understand, reason, and ...
*
Ontology alignment Ontology alignment, or ontology matching, is the process of determining correspondences between concepts in ontologies. A set of correspondences is also called an alignment. The phrase takes on a slightly different meaning, in computer science, c ...
*
Ontology (information science) In information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definitions of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, or entities that pertain to one, many, or all domains of discourse. More ...
*
Semantic integration Semantic integration is the process of interrelating information from diverse sources, for example calendars and to do lists, email archives, presence information (physical, psychological, and social), documents of all sorts, contacts (including ...
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Semantic matching Semantic matching is a technique used in computer science to identify information that is semantically related. Given any two graph-like structures, e.g. classifications, taxonomies database or XML schemas and ontologies, matching is an operato ...
*
Semantic translation Semantic translation is the process of using semantic information to aid in the translation of data in one representation or data model to another representation or data model. Semantic translation takes advantage of semantics that associate mean ...


References


Further reading

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External links

* {{Citizendium, Ontological commitment#Conceptualization Information science Knowledge engineering Knowledge representation Ontology (information science) Semantic Web Technical communication