Contextualising Ontologies with Image, Number and Rationality

Contextualising Ontologies with Image, Number and Rationality

Soon, Kean Huat

2018-10-03

Ontologies have been proven useful in areas such as information management and Artificial Intelligence. Based on ontologies, datasets using the same concepts can be integrated or converted automatically. The same concept however can represent different features depending upon perspectives. A concept “building” for instance can represent a physical building, a design building or a 3D building model and these “buildings” are related to one another based on certain logics. If one simply converts IFC to CityGML using the same concept “building” without considering the explicit representations and the logics the representations should relate, one may inappropriately use the resulted outputs as the models may have changed from design to physical and the changes involved in the life cycle are not made explicit. The paper demonstrates a framework to contextualise ontologies based on different perspectives from I Ching, Book of Change. The perspectives are Image (象), Number (数) and Rationality (理). Image refers to the explicit representation a concept represents; Number refers to the computational models in formats that computer systems are able to process and read. Rationality means the logics things should relate. In different perspectives, the same concept can be represented differently. As a case study, the paper illustrates how the framework can be applied in a previous research that integrates the legal space from the ePlan model and the physical space from the CityGML schema based on the LADM OWL ontology. From the different perspectives, the framework allows to check if the data is correctly integrated or converted to prevent information loss. Although the framework is conceptual, the next step is to formalise the ontologies to include the perspectives in a formal language like OWL.

I Ching
Ontologies
Building
ePlan
CityGML
LADM OWL

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