information science Information science (also known as information studies) is an academic field which is primarily concerned with analysis, collection, Categorization, classification, manipulation, storage, information retrieval, retrieval, movement, dissemin ...

a conceptualization is an abstract simplified view of some selected part 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 In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exis ...

, and it may occur that a conceptualization can be realized by several distinct ontologies. An ''

ontological commitment An ontological commitment of a language is one or more objects postulated to exist by that language. The 'existence' referred to need not be 'real', but exist only in a universe of discourse. As an example, legal systems use vocabulary referring t ...

'' 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 technical, scientific and social aspects involved in building, maintaining and using knowledge-based systems. Background Expert systems One of the first examples of an expert system was MYCIN, an appl ...

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 ( he, , ''Mīgdal Bāḇel'') narrative in Genesis 11:1–9 is an origin myth meant to explain why the world's peoples speak different languages. According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language and mi ...

' 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 plain language description of the steps in an algorithm or another system. Pseudocode often uses structural conventions of a normal programming language, but is intended for human reading rather than machine re ...

(a strictly structured form of ordinary language) leading to implementation in several different formal computer languages like

Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping ...

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 vect ...

can be illustrated using a

vector space In mathematics and physics, a vector space (also called a linear space) is a set whose elements, often called ''vectors'', may be added together and multiplied ("scaled") by numbers called '' scalars''. Scalars are often real numbers, but can ...

or a

topological space In mathematics, a topological space is, roughly speaking, a geometrical space in which closeness is defined but cannot necessarily be measured by a numeric distance. More specifically, a topological space is a set whose elements are called points ...

that introduce interpretations of the 'elements' of the conceptualization and additional relationships between them but preserve the connections required in the

References

External links

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

Purpose and implementation

See also

References

Further reading

External links