Concept-based declarative description subsystem for Computer-Aided Declarative Design (CADD)

Computer-Aided Declarative Design systems are focused at the early phase of design, the conceptual phase, employing declarative modelling in order to provide the user with tools and techniques aiming to capture his/her intuition and better expression of his/her mental ideas. In this paper, we argue that within this process, the introduction of the notion of concept could assist the description phase by offering the designer prior knowledge structures. In order to support concept representation and organization, we propose a specific ontology. We extend previous work, focusing on the representation of concepts in CADD systems by developing a subsystem that also deals with concept definition, evolution, ontology re-arrangement and we analyse its incorporation in CADD system architecture. As a domain example, we refer to Architecture.