Giancarlo Guizzardi

On the General Ontological Foundations of Conceptual Modeling

As pointed out in the pioneering work of [WSW99, EW01], an upper level ontology allows to evaluate the ontological correctness of a conceptual model and to develop guidelines how the constructs of a conceptual modeling language should be used. In this paper we adopt the General Ontological Language (GOL), proposed in [DHHS01], for this purpose. We discuss a number of issues that arise when applying the concepts of GOL to UML class diagrams as a conceptual modeling language. We also compare our ontological analysis of some parts of the UML with the one proposed in [EW01].

An ontologically well-founded profile for UML conceptual models

UML class diagrams can be used as a language for expressing a conceptual model of a domain. In a series of papers [1,2,3] we have been using the General Ontological Language (GOL) and its underlying upper level ontology, proposed in [4,5], to evaluate the ontological correctness of a conceptual UML class model and to develop guidelines for how the constructs of the UML should be used in conceptual modeling. In this paper, we focus on the UML metaconcepts of classes and objects from an ontological point of view. We use a philosophically and psychologically well-founded theory of classifiers to propose a UML profile for Ontology Representation and Conceptual Modeling. Moreover, we propose a design pattern based on this profile to target a recurrent problem in role modeling discussed in the literature. Finally, we demonstrate the relevance of the tools proposed by applying them to solve recurrent problems in the practice of conceptual modeling.

Towards Ontological Foundations for the Conceptual Modeling of Events

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the application of foundational ontologies, i.e., formal ontological theories in the philosophical sense, to provide a theoretically sound foundation for improving the theory and practice of conceptual modeling. In this paper, we present advances on our research on the ontological foundations of conceptual modeling by addressing the concept of events. We present a foundational ontology of events termed UFO-B together with its axiomatization in first-order logic. Moreover, we report on an implementation of UFO-B using the computational logic language Alloy, and discuss its consistency, validation and possible uses.

Towards Ontological Foundations for UML Conceptual Models

UML class diagrams can be used as a language for expressing a conceptual model of a domain. We use the General Ontological Language (GOL) and its underlying upper level ontology, proposed in [1], to evaluate the ontological correctness of a conceptual UML class model and to develop guidelines for how the constructs of the UML should be used in conceptual modeling. In particular, we discuss the UML metaconcepts of classes and objects, power-types, association and aggregation/composition from an ontological point of view. We make some proposals of how to extend version 1.4 of the UML in order to obtain a more satisfactory treatment of aggregation.

Using the Unified Foundational Ontology(UFO) as a Foundation for General Conceptual Modeling Languages

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in approaches that employ ontological models as theoretical tools for analyzing and improving conceptual modeling languages. In this paper we present a philosophically and cognitively well-founded formal ontology which has been developed with the special purpose of serving as a foundation for general conceptual modeling languages. Furthermore, we demonstrate how this foundational ontology named the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) has been used to evaluate and redesign the metamodel of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for the purpose of conceptual modeling.

A Model-Based Tool for Conceptual Modeling and Domain Ontology Engineering in OntoUML

This paper presents a Model-Based graphical editor for supporting the creation of conceptual models and domain ontologies in a philosophically and cognitively well-founded modeling language named OntoUML. The Editor is designed in a way that, on one hand, it shields the user from the complexity of the ontological principles underlying this language. On the other hand, it reinforces these principles in the produced models by providing a mechanism for automatic formal constraint verification.

Situations in Conceptual Modeling of Context

In previous work, we have defined conceptual foundations that can be beneficially used in context modeling. These conceptual foundations include the separation of entity and context, and the characterization of context as either Intrinsic or Relational. This paper aims at extending this approach by introducing the ontological concept of Situation as means of composing the elements of our ontology (entities, intrinsic and relational contexts) to model particular states of affairs of interest. Our concepts have been inspired by and aligned with conceptual theories from the fields of philosophy and cognitive sciences.

An ontology-based approach for evaluating the domain appropriateness and comprehensibility appropriateness of modeling languages

In this paper we present a framework for the evaluation and (re)design of modeling languages. We focus here on the evaluation of the suitability of a language to model a set of real-world phenomena in a given domain. In our approach, this property can be systematically evaluated by comparing the level of homomorphism between a concrete representation of the worldview underlying the language (captured in a metamodel of the language), with an explicit and formal representation of a conceptualization of that domain (a reference ontology). The framework proposed comprises a number of properties that must be reinforced for an isomorphism to take place between these two entities. In order to illustrate the approach proposed, we evaluate and extend a fragment of the UML static metamodel for the purpose of conceptual modeling, by comparing it with an excerpt of a philosophically and cognitive well-founded reference ontology.

Organizing Ontology Design Patterns as Ontology Pattern Languages

Ontology design patterns have been pointed out as a promising ap- proach for ontology engineering. The goal of this paper is twofold. Firstly, based on well-established works in Software Engineering, we revisit the notion of ontology patterns in Ontology Engineering to introduce the notion of ontolo- gy pattern language as a way to organize related ontology patterns. Secondly, we present an overview of a software process ontology pattern language.

On the Foundations of UML as an Ontology Representation Language

There is a growing interest in the use of UML class diagrams as a modeling language to represent domain ontologies. In a series of papers [1,2] we have been using the General Ontological Language (GOL) and its underly-ing foundational ontology, proposed in [3,4], to evaluate the ontological correctness of a conceptual UML class model and to develop guidelines for how the constructs of the UML should be used in conceptual modeling and ontology representation. This paper can be seen as a continuation of this work, in which we focus on analyzing the UML metaconcepts of classes, attributes, data types and associations from an ontological point of view