Conceptual modeling as language design

Abstract

Conceptual modeling is a broad practice encompassing knowledge organization, domain modeling, and knowledge representation. It is best understood not as a scientific process of discovery, but as a constructive process of language design. This constructive process involves both explicating differences of meaning implicit in some discursive tradition and revising those differences to improve that tradition. Understood this way, conceptual modeling can serve as the basis for a paradigm of information research and practice that does not reproduce fundamental asymmetries between researchers and the people they study, or between practitioners and the people they serve. Progress within this paradigm will involve combining methods from what have up to now been different traditions or modes of conceptual modeling. It will require paying closer attention to the historical and structural dimensions of discursive traditions and reimagining the function of critique.