Independence of concepts with application to conceptual modeling

This paper investigates the independence relation of concepts and its application to conceptual modeling which is important for knowledge engineering and software engineering of today. Four possible (collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive) basic relations of two concepts are given and analyzed, whereby the notion of independence relation is introduced. Formalism for the independence of concepts is presented. Forms of expressions for defining or describing concepts in a description logic TBox are discussed, with emphasis on the form of intersection of independent concepts.