Abstract
For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the ontological foundations of Conceptual Modeling by participating to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and the UFO-based modeling language OntoUML, which have been successfully employed in a number of different sectors. The empirical feedback from these experiences led us to reconsider UFO’s theory of relations, proposing a new theory that has already been applied to model subtle notions in the business domain, such as value, risk, service, and contract. In this paper, we advance a first formal characterization of this new theory, which is then used to design a new metamodel for OntoUML.
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Notes
- 1.
The taxonomy we are describing, depicted in Fig. 2, has been slightly changed with respect to UFO’s original one.
- 2.
We stick to the term ‘mediation’ just for reasons of compatibility with previous papers. In the past we also used ‘involvement’, which is perhaps a better terminological alternative.
- 3.
We only present an excerpt of the formalization here. The complete formalization is available at https://github.com/diporello/UFO-Ontology-of-Relations/.
- 4.
The set of stereotypes for endurant types presented here is partial, but suffices for the interpretation of the discussed relations and examples. The complete list is drawn from [13].
- 5.
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Fonseca, C.M., Porello, D., Guizzardi, G., Almeida, J.P.A., Guarino, N. (2019). Relations in Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling. In: Laender, A., Pernici, B., Lim, EP., de Oliveira, J. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11788. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33223-5_4
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