A Framework for Organizing Role Concepts Based on their Dependencies on Contexts

Abstract

Based on some fundamental theories of ontology, we can treat a role concept as a concept which an entity plays in a context and discriminate it from a basic concept. Because a theory of role concepts makes a static policy for treatment of views and contexts related to conceptualization, discrimination of role concepts contributes effectively to management of instance models. In our research, we have developed an ontology building environment, which provides a framework for representation of role concepts and their characteristics. However, in the framework, role concepts are dealt with in a basic concept centered view and their definitions are scattered around in the respective related concepts which give the context of the roles. This is why users cannot easily represent relations among role concepts and grasp their whole image in an ontology. In this paper, as an extension of this framework, we present a framework for organizing role concepts in a hierarchy from role centered view. We investigate how o organize role concepts according to their contextual dependencies and focus on defining and organizing a role concept which depends on several contexts. keywords: context, ontology, ontology development, role. © 2005, The Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence. All rights reserved.