Authors: Joerg Evermann
Tags: 2005, conceptual modeling
Knowledge engineering, knowledge management and conceptual mod-elling are concerned with representing knowledge of business and organizationaldomains. These research areas use ontologies for knowledge representation.Ontologies are understood either in the philosophical sense as firm metaphysicalcommitments or in the looser sense of dictionaries or taxonomies.This paper critically examines the understanding and use of ontologies andknowledge representation languages in information systems (IS) research andapplication. As ontologies are intended to be conceptualizations of a perceivedreality, they should reflect the empirically observed reality. This motivates propos-ing psychology of language as a reference discipline for knowledge engineeringand knowledge management. Natural language is argued to reflect the cognitiveconcepts we use to think about and perceive the world around us. These cognitiveconcepts are the relevant terms with which to structure and represent knowledgeabout the world.Psychology of language can provide empirical justification for a particular set ofconcepts to represent knowledge. This paper draws on psycho-linguistic researchto develop a proposal for a system of cognitive structures. This is argued to providethe relevant concepts on which to found knowledge representation schemata for knowledge engineering, knowledge management and conceptual modelling.Read the full paper here: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/information-systems
