A support to domain knowledge modelling : a case study
Résumé
Current knowledge engineering research works agree in describing the structure of knowledge based systems through highly structured models. More and more, knowledge acquisition combines problem-solving and domain knowledge modelling in an iterative process. Modelling domain knowledge involves two activities: constructing domain models which describe collections of statements about the domain (or domain theories) and constructing domain ontologies which provide the vocabulary for expressing domain models. In this article, we introduce an extended E/R model that we defined. We show that the constructs it offers fulfil the requirements for domain knowledge modelling. Indeed, we explain how it can help to identify concepts, to structure a domain model and to elicit additional domain knowledge. Then, we focus on a case study extracted from an operational project. Through this case, we explain how the language helps in analyzing the information acquired during interviews, we report the consequences on the model and in a last section, we list four structuring criteria which guided us in the ontology design.