Conceptual Knowledge Markup Language: An introduction

Conceptual Knowledge Markup Language (CKML) is an application of XML. Earlier versions of CKML followed rather exclusively the philosophy of Conceptual Knowledge Processing (CKP), a principled approach to knowledge representation and data analysis that “advocates methods and instruments of conceptual knowledge processing which support people in their rational thinking, judgment and acting and promote critical discussion”. The new version of CKML continues to follow this approach, but also incorporates various principles, insights and techniques from Information Flow (IF), the logical design of distributed systems. Among other things, this allows diverse communities of discourse to compare their own information structures, as coded in logical theories, with that of other communities that share a common generic ontology. CKML incorporates the CKP ideas of concept lattice and formal context, along with the IF ideas of classification (= formal context), infomorphism, theory, interpretation and local logic. Ontology Markup Language (OML), a subset of CKML that is a self-sufficient markup language in its own right, follows the principles and ideas of Conceptual Graphs (CG). OML is used for structuring the specifications and axiomatics of metadata into ontologies. OML incorporates the CG ideas of concept, conceptual relation, conceptual graph, conceptual context, participants and ontology. The link from OML to CKML is the process of conceptual scaling, which is the interpretive transformation of ontologically structured knowledge to conceptual structured knowledge. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.