Keynote talk: Conceptual modeling versus ontologies

Abstract

Researchers as well as application developers tend to follow the latest trend that consists in building their information system around a newly developed ontology specific to their application domain. While sometimes this approach is perfectly justified, some other times it appears to be just a fashion effect. The goal of this talk is to clarify the situation, showing in which situation a database approach is preferable to an ontological approach and vice versa, based on the specific features of either approaches.