A Formal Modeling Method Applied to Environmental-Knowledge Engineering

Abstract

This paper is about communicating and sharing knowledge, in the context of environmental sciences and the semantic Web. We present how to formally obtain ontologies from concept maps. Concept maps are a flexible and informal form of knowledge representation, while ontologies are oriented to processing carried out by machines. The mapping between concept maps and ontologies is a formal transformation, which semantically analyzes the relations linking the concepts in the map. The proposed method has been applied to an environmental domain, through tests on several concept maps.