Data modelling versus ontology engineering

Abstract

Ontologies in current computer science parlance are computer based resources that represent agreed domain semantics. Unlike data models, the fundamental asset of ontologies is their relative independence of particular applications, i.e. an ontology consists of relatively generic knowledge that can be reused by different kinds of applications/tasks. The first part of this paper concerns some aspects that help to understand the differences and similarities between ontologies and data models. In the second part we present an ontology engineering framework that supports and favours the genericity of an ontology. We introduce the DOGMA ontology engineering approach that separates "atomic" conceptual relations from "predicative" domain rules. A DOGMA ontology consists of an ontology base that holds sets of intuitive context-specific conceptual relations and a layer of "relatively generic" ontological commitments that hold the domain rules. This constitutes what we shall call the double articulation of a DOGMA ontology 1 .