Semantic hierarchies and abstractions in conceptual schemata

摘要

A conceptual schema is a clear, easy to understand and exact representation of the semantics of an underlying universe of discourse. The role of such schemata in the specification and design of information bases is now widely recognized. However, in “real life” applications, it is often the case that the size of the conceptual schema exceeds the limit above which it is necessary to have an abstraction mechanism available, as otherwise it would become difficult to understand.In this paper, we present several concepts and heuristic procedures which allow for semantic modularization of a conceptual schema, thus providing a concise representation, using different degrees of abstraction and/or viewpoints, of a schema of any size.