Authors: Claudenir M. Fonseca, Giancarlo Guizzardi, João Paulo A. Almeida, Victorio A. Carvalho
Tags: 2017, conceptual modeling
Since the late 1980s, there has been a growing interest in the use of foundational ontologies toprovide a sound theoretical basis for the discipline of conceptual modeling. This has led to thedevelopment of ontology-based conceptual modeling techniques whose modeling primitivesreflect the conceptual categories defined in a foundational ontology. The ontology-basedconceptual modeling language OntoUML, for example, incorporates the distinctions underlyingthe taxonomy of types in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) (e.g., kinds, phases, roles,mixins, etc.). This approach has focused so far on the support to types whoseinstances areindividualsin the subject domain, with no provision fortypes of types(or categories ofcategories). In this paper we address this limitation by extending the Unified FoundationalOntology with the MLT multi-level theory. The UFO-MLT combination serves as a foundationfor conceptual models that can benefit from the ontological distinctions of UFO as well as MLT’sbasic concepts and patterns for multi-level modeling. We discuss the impact of the extendedfoundation to multi-level conceptual modeling.Read the full paper here: https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/sd/pii/S0169023X17301052?token=999EBE1E425C95CF799C5B33788599BB2A9D55F88B3264426A082D6A363FA7F770B65236CBD2A1FB727B837E93F52B28
