A FCA-based ontology construction for the design of class hierarchy

Abstract

One of the most tasks of object-oriented software designers is the design of the class hierarchy and the relationships among classes. Since there are many conceptual similarities with the design of an ontology, and an ontology is semantically richer than a UML class model, it makes sense to put the emphasis on ontology design. That is, an object-oriented software designer can design an ontology by organizing object classes in a class hierarchy and creating relationships among classes. UML models can then be generated from the ontology. In this paper, we introduce the Formal Concept Analysis(FCA) as the basis for a practical and well founded methodological approach to the construction of ontology. We show a semi-automatic, graphic and interactive tool to support this approach. The purpose of this work is to provide a semi-automatic methods for the ontology developers. We describe here the basic ideas of the work and its current state. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.