Dealing with Some Conceptual Data Model Requirements for Biological Domains

Knowledge representation in the biological domain suffers from two main difficulties that make it hard to apply traditional conceptual modeling tools: the inherent domain complexity and its constant evolution. The former requires complex types and associations, whereas the latter calls for an expressive language. We list in this paper a set of requirements for conceptual data modeling that should fulfil biologists´ needs. We discuss these requirements by analyzing representation problems using traditional conceptual modeling languages. We claim that the biological domain deserves an ad-hoc modeling approach that would help with activities such as data integration and database design.