  Conceptual Knowledge Markup Language (CKML) is an application of XML. Earlier
versions of CKML followed rather exclusively the philosophy of Conceptual
Knowledge Processing (CKP), a principled approach to knowledge representation
and data analysis that "advocates methods and instruments of conceptual
knowledge processing which support people in their rational thinking, judgment
and acting and promote critical discussion." The new version of CKML continues
to follow this approach, but also incorporates various principles, insights and
techniques from Information Flow (IF), the logical design of distributed
systems. Among other things, this allows diverse communities of discourse to
compare their own information structures, as coded in logical theories, with
that of other communities that share a common generic ontology. CKML
incorporates the CKP ideas of concept lattice and formal context, along with
the IF ideas of classification (= formal context), infomorphism, theory,
interpretation and local logic. Ontology Markup Language (OML), a subset of
CKML that is a self-sufficient markup language in its own right, follows the
principles and ideas of Conceptual Graphs (CG). OML is used for structuring the
specifications and axiomatics of metadata into ontologies. OML incorporates the
CG ideas of concept, conceptual relation, conceptual graph, conceptual context,
participants and ontology. The link from OML to CKML is the process of
conceptual scaling, which is the interpretive transformation of ontologically
structured knowledge to conceptual structured knowledge.
