Conceptual Modeling and Ontologies
One of my research directions pursued the semantic ordering of complex systems through concepts, ontologies and coherent partial models. This area includes my concerns with concerns, domain ontologies, ontological UML models, views and facets of information systems.
This branch acquired a particularly coherent form through the collaboration with my doctoral student Crenguța Mădălina Bogdan, who developed this theme in a doctoral thesis and in a series of representative papers.
Research theme
In this direction, conceptual modeling is not viewed as a simple static description of a domain, but as the result of an analysis process that starts from the actors involved, from their concerns, from their language and from the knowledge structures they use. Hence the interest in concerns, in their ontological definition and in the construction of domain models capable of supporting information systems development.
An important point of this direction was the idea that an information system should not be viewed through a single dominant decomposition, but through a plurality of views, built from semantically motivated facets. In this way, complexity can be ordered without losing the richness of the domain.
Crenguța Mădălina Bogdan
Crenguța Mădălina Bogdan
The doctoral student who most systematically developed my research direction concerning concerns, ontologies and view-oriented modeling of information systems.
Thesis: A concern-based approach to view-oriented modeling of information systems (2007)
Her theme links the modeling of complex systems, ontologies, semantic rationales, ontological UML models and the construction of views and facets.
Main papers
The series below traces the transition from concern-oriented analysis to the ontological definition of the concern, then to domain ontology, to facet construction and, finally, to system modeling as an aggregation of multi-faceted views.
- Toward a Concern-Oriented Analysis Method for Enterprise Information Systems (2006) – the genesis paper of the concern-oriented method.
- Understanding Concerns with Ontologies (2008) – the pivot paper in which the notion of concern is ontologically clarified and the CONO ontology is introduced.
- Towards an Ontology using a Concern-Oriented Approach for Information Systems Analysis (2007) – the step from the concern-oriented method to domain ontology.
- A Concern-Oriented and Ontology-Based Approach to Constructing Facets of Information Systems (2007) – the paper in which the theme of facets explicitly appears.
- Concern-Oriented and Ontology-Based Analysis of Information Systems (2010) – the synthesis and maturity text of the entire direction.
Branches and links
Some of the applications of this direction, especially those related to clinical trials, will be integrated separately in the medical informatics section. There, the works on selection criteria ontology, clinical protocols and the informational facets associated with this domain will be placed.
In its basic form, however, this theme belongs to my research in the area of artificial intelligence, more precisely to that zone where knowledge representation and conceptual structures attempt to offer a rigorous basis for the modeling of complex systems.