The notion of role in conceptual modelling

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the concept of knowledge roles in conceptual modeling, comparing various approaches and proposing developments to enhance reasoning with domain knowledge.

Contribution

It introduces properties to analyze and define knowledge roles, and evaluates existing approaches to improve the integration of reasoning and domain models.

Findings

Different approaches handle problem solving and domain models distinctly.

Properties for analyzing and characterizing knowledge roles are proposed.

Recommendations for better exploiting reasoning with domain knowledge are presented.

Abstract

In this article we analyse the notion of knowledge role. First of all, we present how the relationship between problem solving methods and domain models is tackled in different approaches. We concentrate on how they cope with this issue in the knowledge engineering process. Secondly, we introduce several properties which can be used to analyse, characterise and define the notion of role. We evaluate and compare the works exposed previously following these dimensions. This analysis suggests some developments to better exploit the relationship between reasoning and domain knowledge. We present them in a last section.