Towards a cognitive foundation for knowledge representation

Abstract

Knowledge engineering, knowledge management and conceptual modelling are concerned with representing knowledge of business and organizational domains. These research areas use ontologies for knowledge representation. Ontologies are understood either in the philosophical sense as firm metaphysical commitments or in the looser sense of dictionaries or taxonomies.This paper critically examines the understanding and use of ontologies and knowledge representation languages in information systems (IS) research and application. As ontologies are intended to be conceptualizations of a perceived reality, they should reflect the empirically observed reality. This motivates proposing psychology of language as a reference discipline for knowledge engineering and knowledge management. Natural language is argued to reflect the cognitive concepts we use to think about and perceive the world around us. These cognitive concepts are the relevant terms with which to structure and represent knowledge about the world.Psychology of language can provide empirical justification for a particular set of concepts to represent knowledge. This paper draws on psycho-linguistic research to develop a proposal for a system of cognitive structures. This is argued to provide the relevant concepts on which to found knowledge representation schemata for knowledge engineering, knowledge management and conceptual modelling.

Evaluating Ontologies: Towards a Cognitive Measure of Quality

“…An initial example of such work is [39]. Moreover, by being able to investigate specific sets of concepts, our method allows pinpointing problematic areas within an ontology for improvements.…”

“…on pictorial representations of concept instances. Initial ideas for such methods are briefly presented in [39].…”

“…Our work is based on the principle that an ontology, as a formal description of a domain, must conform to the way in which the domain is perceived and understood by a human observer [1,39,40], i.e. its conceptualization (Fig.…”

Information Systems Foundations: Theory Building in Information Systems

“…Moreover, other ontologies exist that might be as appropriate or more so (Milton and Kazmierczak, 2004). While some argue that the post-hoc empirical success of this ontology in explaining different phenomena around IS design justifies the adoption of and reliance on this particular adaptation of this particular subset of this particular ontology, these studies often have challenges in validity (Evermann, 2005b). For example, rarely is the underlying theory sufficiently formalised and sufficiently specific to exclude competing explanations of the phenomena.…”

“…For example, rarely is the underlying theory sufficiently formalised and sufficiently specific to exclude competing explanations of the phenomena. Different authors have at times challenged the use of this ontology as inadequate (Evermann, 2005b;Wyssusek, 2005), and other areas of science have developed a very different understanding of ontology than the IS field (Noy and Hafner, 1997;Uschold and Gruninger, 1996).…”