VERIFICATION OF CONCEPTUAL MODELS BASED ON LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE

As conceptual models reflect people's perception of real-world phenome na, they are closely tied to the way people describe and talk about th ese phenomena in natural language. The models, used for developing dat abase and information systems and for presenting or explaining databas es, usually include linguistic notions to help interpret their content s. In this paper, we show how linguistic knowledge from a semantically based lexicon can be used to check the quality of conceptual models. The check is a natural extension of traditional verification checks, a nd its purpose is to ensure that words and phrases included in the mod els are used in a linguistically meaningful way. Linguistic expression s must be of the correct type, and the relationships between expressio ns in the model must be acceptable with respect to the semantic constr aints indicated in the lexicon.