Skip to main content

The Idea of Concept Systems

An involuntary hiatus has prevented me from the pleasure of blogging on definitions for about a month.  I am now gradually getting back to normal, and am able to blog again.

Today I want to look at concept systems, and types of concept system.

In data modeling, only one type of concept system commonly appears - the generic concept system, containing Supertypes and Subtypes.  Very occasionally, the part-whole type of concept system can also be found.  The latter be seen in "bill of material" structures.  Strangely, the visual representation of a generic concept system and a part-whole concept system can look very similar in a data model.   I think that this leads data modelers to play down the idea of concept systems, and indeed the term "concept system" is not really met with in data modeling.

However, if we turn to the discipline of terminology, the idea of concept system is very prominent, and different types of concept systems are called out.  Let me quote from the Nordterm Guide to Terminology by Heidi Suonuuti (ISBN 952-9794-14-2):

"Concepts are not independent phenomena.  They are always related to other concepts in one way or another, and form concept systems which can vary from fairly simple to extremely complicated.  In terminology work, an analysis of the relations among concepts and an arrangement of them into concept systems, is a prerequisite for the successful drafting of definitions."

It is interesting that from the data modeler's perspective, concept systems are viewed only with respect to designing data storage solutions.  A terminologist, by contrast, is more interested in business information and how concepts are related within it - irrespective of how such information might be stored as data.

This makes me wonder about semantic modelers.  We hear a lot about semantics these days, and there is no doubt that semantics involves identifying concepts and providing definitions for them.  But finding the relationships between the concepts must be done prior to forming the definitions.  This is because a definition, in part, describes a concept's relations to other concepts in the concept system in which it is found.  So what good methodologies, notations, and techniques exist for describing or visualizing concept systems?  I am not sure we have yet got any good ones.   The danger is that we then fall back on the data modeling methodologies, notations, and techniques, which fail to capture significant semantic details.

But perhaps more important is that the terminologists have the idea of types of concept systems.  The generic and partitive types of concept system are the major ones, but there are others.  We will deal with the different types in a future post.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Create Your Own Social Networking Site

Create Your Own Social Networking Site JCOW: Ethical Hacking Top 10 reasons to choose Jcow:- 1. Handle more traffic - Clean codes and Dynamic caching can lower the CPU load and  speed up your website. 2 Make your site more interactive - Well designed Jcow applications help you members to connect and communicate with others more effectively. 3 Add questions to the Registration Form - You can add new member fields, which will be displayed to the registration form, profile form, and the member browsing form. 4 Easily share stuff - Within the AJAX sharing Box, your members can publish status,  photos, videos, and blogs. 5 Customize and Extend your Jcow Network - A Jcow network consists of core apps(like "Friends" and "Messages") and optional apps(like "Blogs" and ""Videos"). You can enable/disable optional apps. You can also develop your own apps. 6 Every profile could be Unique - Members can customize their own profile theme and  add music play...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Problem of Abstraction in Definitions of Data Objects

I think there is a major problem in not being able to understand and work with different levels of abstraction.  By "abstraction" in this sense I mean one concept system that somehow describes or defines (not merely relates to) another concept system.  I think this is a big problem for definitions in data models. Let us take an example in a retail business such as mortgage banking: Customer Name.  Customer Name exists in the business.  They use it all the time.  Maybe it is sometimes called Borrower Name, but the concept is the same.  This is the Level 1 abstraction. Now let us think of data values in a column in a table that holds Customer Name.  These data values are stored as a code of 1's and 0's.  Of course these bits are rendered into something we can read.  However, this is not the same as the Customer Name in the business.  I worked for a place where they prefixed the name of anyone who had recently left with "ZZZ"....
Post a Comment
Read more

The Problems of Pluto - 2: What is a Definition Authority?

In a previous post (http://definitionsinsemantics.blogspot.com/2011/11/evolution-of-definitions-problem-of.html) the topic of the IAU's 2006 redefinition of the term "planet" was discussed (see http://www.iau.org/public_press/news/detail/iau0603/).  There are many topics relevant to definitions surrounding this event - one of them is the problem of authority.  The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is the organization that came up with the new definition of "planet".  Does this make it an authority?  It does if we define "authority" as "a source of a definition that publishes, and administers, and supports this definition".  However, the term "authority" carries emotional content also.  "Authority" can imply (a) a role of active enforcement; (b) an obligation of obedience upon the body politic.  These implications exist because "authority" is a term that defines many concepts, and some of them have to do with...
Post a Comment
Read more