Mapping between a NIAM conceptual schema and KEE frames

摘要

The basis of knowledge representation in both information systems and expert systems is a declarative specification of the facts about some Universe of Discourse. Representation schemes can be considered on the conceptual level, which is concerned only with the semantics of these facts, or at the internal level, which is concerned with the implementation of these facts in computer-oriented data structures. The requirements at each level are very different.Intellicorp's Knowledge Engineering Environment (KEE) supports a frame-based representation language for defining knowledge bases. KEE's frame language is unsuitable for use at the conceptual level because it fails to satisfy both the ISO Conceptualisation Principle and a weaker form of the ISO 100% Principle (called the Explicit Representation Principle).However, KEE could still be used as a representation scheme at the internal level. This will permit us to use a conceptual description language (with all the well-known advantages) to describe analyse the Universe of Discourse for a knowledge-based application, and to effectively implement this system using the existing (and expanding) body of KEE support software. In this paper, I will present a mapping between a NIAM knowledge base and a KEE knowledge base. This mapping is formally defined by a conceptual schema which permits us to record the required mapping information. The constraints on this conceptual schema reflect the necessary restrictions on the mapping transformation. Using this mapping schema, I will develop procedures to map the dynamic (update) operations on a NIAM conceptual database into corresponding operations on the KEE knowledge base.