Using ontologies to resolve semantic conflicts in information systems design

Nowadays, new technologies contribute to make Information Systems (IS) more and more complex. So, IS modelling requires the use of a referential to resolve some problems and conflicts due to the ignorance of the field to be modelled, to the complexity and the multitude of the concepts used. These concepts come from heterogeneous sources. This heterogeneity often involves semantic ambiguities (for example synonymy, homonymy, antonymy, etc). This referential can be represented using ontology. For a given domain, ontology allows the identification of its concepts, their relationships and the semantic checking at the time of the conceptualization phase. Thereafter, this ontology is coupled with a CASE to check, at the time of applications design, the semantic coherence of the conceptual representations (CR) specified by the designers. In this paper, we present the use of ontologies as an assistance to resolve semantic conflicts in the IS design.