A Case study on building conceptual schemas by refining general ontologies

Abstract

This document presents a case study to validate a new approach to develop conceptual schemas (or databases) for information systems, consisting in the refinement of a general ontology [CdPO03]. We use a well-known case study [BCN92] to execute the three activities required to develop a conceptual schema from a general ontology: the refinement, pruning and refactoring activities. We first present the requirements of the case study and then refine the general ontology OG to obtain the extended ontology OX. We have developed a software prototype to automate the pruning and the refactoring activities. Therefore, a pruned ontology OP and a first version of conceptual schema CS1 has been obtained using this prototype. Finally, the quality of CS1 has been improved by means of manual refactorings to obtain a final conceptual schema CS. In this case study, we have used the public version of the Cyc ontology [LGP+90]. However, for a practical application we find it convenient to use as conceptual modelling language the UML, so that we believe our results apply to any similar language.