Pruning and refactoring ontologies in the development of conceptual schemas of information systems

• Autores: Jordi Conesa
• Directores de la Tesis: Antoni Olivé Ramon (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) ( España ) en 2008
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Oscar Pastor López (presid.) , Ernest Teniente López (secret.) , Arantza Illarramendi Echave (voc.) , Vijayan Sugumaran (voc.) , Joan A. Pastor-Collado (voc.)
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• Resumen

  • In the information systems (IS) development, one of the main difficulties is the creation of its conceptual schemas, A conceptual schema represents the general knowledge about a domain that an information system needs to know in order to perform its functions. To create a conceptual schema, the designers must know very well the domain of the IS and have a high abstraction capacity. And even when these two conditions are satisfied, the success is not guaranteed. In most cases, this activity is carried out using a conceptual modeling environment that includes one or more CASE tools. Since most of the conceptual modeling environments neither use ontologies nor any conceptual schema as basis, they must create the conceptual schemas from scratch. The roles ontologies may play in the conceptual modeling activity are three: building block, support and base. An ontology may play one or more of these roles together. In the IS field, the base role has been less studied than the support and building block roles. An ontology plays a base role if it is the basis from which the conceptual schema is derived. In such a case, the conceptual schema may be seen as a specialization (refinement or extension) of the ontology. When using the base role, the designer task is to extend the ontology until it includes, as a subset, the intended conceptual schema. The main goal of this thesis is to define a set of automatic techniques to make viable the use of ontologies with a base role within the conceptual modeling activity. We identified three activities (refinement, pruning and refactoring) we consider necessary to obtain a conceptual schema of an IS from an ontology. These activities may be either executed sequentially or iteratively. There are few cases in which some of the activities may be unnecessary, as for example, the refinement activity is not necessary when all the knowledge required for the IS is already in the base ontology. The activities may be summarized as follows: - Refine