EER-CONCEPTOOL: Conceptual Analysis of EER Schemas and Ontologies

We have developed an intelligent knowledge management environment called EER-ConcepTool, which analyses conceptual schemas and ontologies. In this paper, we show how analysis supports knowledge modelling and validation at the conceptual level through a combination of different logicbased and heuristic reasoning services. We highlight how EER-ConcepTool overcomes some typical drawbacks of current intelligent analysers, outlining how it can be used to provide enhanced support to knowledge modelling. Knowledge in EER-ConcepTool is represented using a formal, expressive entity-relationship model. This knowledge model includes entity identifiers, relationship attributes and a full range of participatory cardinality constraints. It also allows multiple inheritance, disjointness and full coverage assertions for entities and relationships. EER-ConcepTool provides a complete set of automated services (e.g. consistency, classification, explicitation and propagation of constraints, linguistic correlation) to analyse schemas and application ontologies based on the above knowledge model. During analysis, EER-ConcepTool can ignore selected portions of the expressive power of this model in order to increase the number and the generality of its deductions. We show how this feature can be used to provide a simple mechanism which explains schema inconsistencies.