Section: New Results

Representation of Ontologies

Participant : Thierry Despeyroux.

As an exploratory research in collaboration with M. Arnoux (University of Rennes), we compared ontology engineering and software engineering. We have investigated analogies between ontologies on one hand, types, objects and data bases on the other one, taking into account the notion of evolution of an ontology. We represent a unique ontology using different paradigms, and observe that the distance between these different concepts is small. We deduced from this constatation that ontologies and more specifically ontology description languages can take advantage of being fertilizated with some other computer science domains and inherit important characteristics as modularity, for example [26] .