Conceptualization (information science)

In information science a conceptualization is an abstract simplified view of some selected part of the world, containing the objects, concepts, and other entities that are presumed of interest for some particular purpose and the relationships between them.^[2]^[3] An explicit specification of a conceptualization is an ontology, and it may occur that a conceptualization can be realized by several distinct ontologies.^[2] An ontological commitment in describing ontological comparisons is taken to refer to that subset of elements of an ontology shared with all the others.^[4]^[5] "An ontology is language-dependent", its objects and interrelations described within the language it uses, while a conceptualization is always the same, more general, its concepts existing "independently of the language used to describe it".^[6] The relation between these terms is shown in the figure to the right.

Not all workers in knowledge engineering use the term ‘conceptualization’, but instead refer to the conceptualization itself, or to the ontological commitment of all its realizations, as an overarching ontology.^[7]

^ This figure has similarities with Figure 1 in Guarino and to slide 7 in the talk by van Harmelen Archived 2009-05-30 at the Wayback Machine. These sources are among the references to this article. The figure is imported from Citizendium.
^ ^a ^b Cite error: The named reference Gruber was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
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^ Cite error: The named reference Ceccaroni1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
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[CZ-1] This figure has similarities with Figure 1 in Guarino and to slide 7 in the talk by van Harmelen Archived 2009-05-30 at the Wayback Machine. These sources are among the references to this article. The figure is imported from Citizendium.

[Gruber-2] Cite error: The named reference Gruber was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[Smith-3] Cite error: The named reference Smith was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[Audi-4] Cite error: The named reference Audi was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[Ceccaroni1-5] Cite error: The named reference Ceccaroni1 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[Guarino-6] Cite error: The named reference Guarino was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

[Ceccaroni-7] Cite error: The named reference Ceccaroni was invoked but never defined (see the help page).

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