Conceptual Modeling

In general, three different views on the notion of concept are distinguished: the classical view, the prototype view and the exemplar view.

Classical View
The classical view dates back to the philosophical works of Plato and Aristotle. Plato defined the notion of forms, which were defined as stable, immutable and ideal descriptions of things. Aristotle continued the research on classification and his work led to the classical view on categorization and concepts. The classical view holds that all instances of the concept must share all the defining properties that are considered necessary and sufficient to define the concept. In other words, an instance must have all of the defining properties to be an instance of the concept and additionally, if an instance has at least the defining properties it is sufficient to denote it as an instance of the concept.

Prototype View
The prototypical view has emerged from the philosophical treatments of Wittgenstein who maintained that for most concepts meaning is determined not by definition but by family resemblance. In the prototype view the concept is not described by defining properties but rather by characterizing properties, features that instances tend to have but need not to have. Basically the view proposes that a concept should be represented by some measure of central tendency of some instances, which is described by a prototype. A prototype is defined as an instance that has all the properties of the central tendency and as such is a highly typical instance or idealization.

Exemplar View
The exemplar view of concepts is quite different from the classical and the prototype view since hereby a concept does not represent an abstracted set of defining features or as a measure of a central tendency. The theory does not require abstraction of instances at all. Instead concepts are represented through exemplars. An exemplar is a specific instance of a certain category, which is used to represent the category.

These three views can be partly understood by considering the following two questions: (1) Is there a unitary for all the instances of the concept? and (2) Are the properties specified in the unitary description true of all the instances of the concept? [Smith & Medin 87]:

Given the different views on concepts the question here is then which of the view of concepts is suitable for architectures. Basically, each view has its advantages and disadvantages and can be applied for solving a particular category of problems. The classical view can be best applied for representing well-defined concepts. The prototype view and exemplar view on the contrary can be best applied in the early phases of concept formation in which specific instances are discovered first and are later generalized. Accordingly, we may apply the prototypical and exemplar view in the early phases of architecture design and the classical view may be applied to define the stable architectural abstractions at later stages of the architecture design in which the knowledge on instances and concepts has got mature.

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