In the real-time design, conceptual solving any new task is impossible without analytical reasoning of designers who interact with natural experience and its models among which important place occupies models of precedents. Moreover, the work with new tasks is a source of such useful models. The quality of applied reasoning essentially depends on the constructive use of appropriate language and its effective models. In the version of conceptual activity described in this book, the use of language means is realized as an ontological support of design thinking that is aimed at solving a new task and creating a model of corresponding precedent. The ontological support provides controlled using the lexis, extracting the questions for managing the analysis, revealing the cause-and effects regularities and achieving the sufficient understanding. Designers fulfill all these actions in interactions with the project ontology that can be developed by manual or programmed way in work with the task.
Top1. Features Of Project Ontology
The success of conceptual designing the systems is based on a personal and mutual understanding of designers and other stakeholders when they operatively use accessible experience in collaborative work. In order to understand something, for example, the designer needs to fulfill the certain work focusing own attention on the object of understanding in appropriate conditions. For this book, the central place occupies the objects of understanding that concern project tasks and processes of their conceptual solutions.
We have developed a complex of means that provide a constructive achievement of understanding in work with tasks at the conceptual level. These means have embedded in the reifying of the precedent-oriented approach and QA-approach. The intertwining use of these approaches includes an ontological support of works aimed at the achievement of sufficient understanding in interactions with tasks. It should be noted, additionally to the support of understanding, the ontology usually helps to achieve the following positive effects: using the controlled vocabulary; systematizing the methods and means used in an occupational activity; specifying the conceptualization; checking the semantics of the built text and applied reasoning; operating with machine-readable and machine-understandable content.
In the fourth chapter, we have described the component “Ontology” that provides creation and use the project ontology at the level of manual operations with cells of the QA-memory. This level is not so suitable for the ontological maintenance in work with understanding. Below, we present an automation of this work. The automation is realized in two following versions:
In both of component versions, their reflections on the semantic memory use the specialized structure of the memory cell that is disclosed in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Typical structure of the concept in the semantic memory
The content embedded to the concept framework corresponds to the following rules of grammar GRQA:
(1)Let us clarify components that are attached to the QA-object presenting the concept. Ontological relations specify a net of ontology units that are bound with the chosen concept. It is necessary to note that the designer has the opportunity for appointing relations such as “isa,” “part-of,” “attributive,” “causative,” “associative” (temporal, spatial, synonymous, opposite, following) and relations of pragmatic types. The designer has the opportunity for extending the list of relations.
For the use of the controlled dictionary in implemented projects, the designer should indicate the type of materialization for any used concept.
References to materializations fix relations of concepts with the space of occupational interest of the designer. It allows preventing the use of words from uncontrolled vocabulary in solutions of project tasks. Furthermore, it helps to check the compatibility of used concepts in reasoning and texts.
Concepts can be combined in groups as in frames of project ontologies so as sections in the kernel ontology the content of which is invariant to the specificity of any project fulfilled by designers. Combining is described by the following set of rules:
(2)It is necessary to note that concepts of the project ontology are, usually, used in definite conditions and that demands to specify variants {∆Ns} of the concept N into the ontology. Such presentation of the concept opens the opportunity for using the means of the pseudocode programming in the creation and use of ontology units.