Abstract
Current efforts to compare knowledge engineering (KE) modelling languages have been limited to either rather shallow comparisons on a broad-set of languages, or to detailed comparisons with limited applicability to a narrow set of languages. In this paper we propose a novel way of organising language comparisons. This method is based on an alternating decomposition of the goals that a language tries to achieve and the linguistic methods it employs to achieve these goals. This new method for comparing languages allows a general comparison at high levels of abstraction, while not preventing more precise comparisons whenever possible. One result of our comparison method is an insight in the different assumptions that underly the languages to be compared. Two further consequences follow from the proposed comparison method, namely (i) a measure for the degree of similarity between languages, and (ii) a method for translating between languages. After describing our method, we apply it to a pair of KE modelling languages, and show how it yields insights in the assumptions underlying the languages and how it can be used to produce a translation procedure between the languages.
This work has been (partially) funded by the Netherlands Computer Science Research Foundation with financial support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) within the REVISE-project, SION-project no. 612-322-316. The following members of the REVISE project contributed to this paper (listed in alphabetical order): Frances Brazier2, Frank van Harmelen2, Remco Straatman1, Jan Treur2, Niek Wijngaards2, Mark Willems2
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© 1996 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Brazier, F., van Harmelen, F., Straatman, R., Treur, J. (1996). A purpose driven method for language comparison. In: Shadbolt, N., O'Hara, K., Schreiber, G. (eds) Advances in Knowledge Acquisition. EKAW 1996. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1076. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61273-4_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-61273-4_5
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