2 research outputs found
Lupascian Non-Negativity Applied to Conceptual Modeling: Alternating Static Potentiality and Dynamic Actuality
In software engineering, conceptual modeling focuses on creating
representations of the world that are as faithful and rich as possible, with
the aim of guiding the development of software systems. In contrast, in the
computing realm, the notion of ontology has been characterized as being closely
related to conceptual modeling and is often viewed as a specification of a
conceptualization. Accordingly, conceptual modeling and ontology engineering
now address the same problem of representing the world in a suitable fashion. A
high-level ontology provides a means to describe concepts and their
interactions with each other and to capture structural and behavioral features
in the intended domain. This paper aims to analyze ontological concepts and
semantics of modeling notations to provide a common understanding among
software engineers. An important issue in this context concerns the question of
whether the modeled world might be stratified into ontological levels. We
introduce an abstract system of two-level domain ontology to be used as a
foundation for conceptual models. We study the two levels of staticity and
dynamics in the context of the thinging machine (TM) model using the notions of
potentiality and actuality that the Franco-Romanian philosopher Stephane
Lupasco developed in logic. He provided a quasi-universal rejection of
contradiction where every event was always associated with a no event, such
that the actualization of an event entails the potentialization of a no event
and vice versa without either ever disappearing completely. This approach is
illustrated by re-modeling UML state machines in TM modeling. The results
strengthen the semantics of a static versus dynamic levels in conceptual
modeling and sharpen the notion of events as a phenomenon without negativity
alternating between the two levels of dynamics and staticity.Comment: 11 pages, 21 figure