Types and taxonomic structures in conceptual modeling:A novel ontological theory and engineering support

Types are fundamental for conceptual modeling and knowledge representation, being an essential construct in all major modeling languages in these fields. Despite that, from an ontological and cognitive point of view, there has been a lack of theoretical support for precisely defining a consensual view on types. As a consequence, there has been a lack of precise methodological support for users when choosing the best way to model general terms representing types that appear in a domain, and for building sound taxonomic structures involving them. For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) - aimed at providing foundations for all major conceptual modeling constructs. At the core of this enterprise, there has been a theory of types specially designed to address these issues. This theory is ontologically well-founded, psychologically informed, and formally characterized. These results have led to the development of a Conceptual Modelling language dubbed OntoUML, reflecting the ontological micro-theories comprising UFO. Over the years, UFO and OntoUML have been successfully employed on conceptual model design in a variety of domains including academic, industrial, and governmental settings. These experiences exposed improvement opportunities for both the OntoUML language and its underlying theory, UFO. In this paper, we revise the theory of types in UFO in response to empirical evidence. The new version of this theory shows that many of OntoUML's meta-types (e.g. kind, role, phase, mixin) should be considered not as restricted to substantial types but instead should be applied to model endurant types in general, including relator types, quality types, and mode types. We also contribute with a formal characterization of this fragment of the theory, which is then used to advance a new metamodel for OntoUML (termed OntoUML 2). To demonstrate that the benefits of this approach are extended beyond OntoUML, the proposed formal theory is then employed to support the definition of UFO-based lightweight Semantic Web ontologies with ontological constraint checking in OWL. Additionally, we report on empirical evidence from the literature, mainly from cognitive psychology but also from linguistics, supporting some of the key claims made by this theory. Finally, we propose a computational support for this updated metamodel.</p

Types and taxonomic structures in conceptual modeling: A novel ontological theory and engineering support

Types are fundamental for conceptual modeling and knowledge representation, being an essential construct in all major modeling languages in these fields. Despite that, from an ontological and cognitive point of view, there has been a lack of theoretical support for precisely defining a consensual view on types. As a consequence, there has been a lack of precise methodological support for users when choosing the best way to model general terms representing types that appear in a domain, and for building sound taxonomic structures involving them. For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) - aimed at providing foundations for all major conceptual modeling constructs. At the core of this enterprise, there has been a theory of types specially designed to address these issues. This theory is ontologically well- founded, psychologically informed, and formally characterized. These results have led to the development of a Conceptual Modelling language dubbed OntoUML, reflecting the ontological micro-theories comprising UFO. Over the years, UFO and OntoUML have been successfully employed on conceptual model design in a variety of domains including academic, industrial, and governmental settings. These experiences exposed improvement opportunities for both the OntoUML language and its underlying theory, UFO. In this paper, we revise the theory of types in UFO in response to empirical evidence. The new version of this theory shows that many of OntoUML’s meta-types (e.g. kind, role, phase, mixin) should be considered not as restricted to substantial types but instead should be applied to model endurant types in general, including relator types, quality types, and mode types. We also contribute with a formal characterization of this fragment of the theory, which is then used to advance a new metamodel for OntoUML (termed OntoUML 2). To demonstrate that the benefits of this approach are extended beyond OntoUML, the proposed formal theory is then employed to support the definition of UFO-based lightweight Semantic Web ontologies with ontological constraint checking in OWL. Additionally, we report on empirical evidence from the literature, mainly from cognitive psychology but also from linguistics, supporting some of the key claims made by this theory. Finally, we propose a computational support for this updated metamodel

A COMMITMENT-BASED REFERENCE ONTOLOGY FOR SERVICE: HARMONIZING SERVICE PERSPECTIVES

Nowadays, the notion of service has been widely adopted in the practice of economic sectors (e.g., Service, Manufacturing, and Extractive sectors), as well as, in the research focus of various disciplines (e.g., Marketing, Business, and Computer Science). Due to that, a number of research initiatives (e.g., service ontologies, conceptual models, and theories) have tried to understand and characterize the complex notion of service. However, due to particular views of these disciplines and economic sectors, a number of different characterizations of service (e.g., service as interaction, service as co-creation of value, and service as capability / manifestation of competence, among others) have been proposed. The existence of these various non-harmonized characterizations, and the focus on a terminological debate about the service concept, instead of about the service phenomena from a broad perspective, make the establishment of a unified body of knowledge for service difficult. This limitation impacts, e.g., the establishment of unified conceptualization for supporting the smooth alignment between Business and IT views in service-oriented enterprise architecture (SoEA), and the design and usage of service modeling languages. In this thesis we define a theoretical foundation for service based on the notion of service commitment and claims as basic elements in the characterization of service relations along service life-cycle phases (service offer, service negotiation, and service delivery). As discussed in this work, this theoretical foundation is capable of harmonizing a number of service perspectives found in the literature. Such theoretical foundation is specified in a well-founded core reference ontology, named UFO-S, which was designed by adopting a sound ontological engineering apparatus (mainly, a well-founded ontology representation language, OntoUML, and approaches of model verification and model validation). As a kind of theory, UFO-S was applied in the analysis of SoEA structuring principles in order to define a commitment-based SoEA view, which remarks social aspects inherent in service relations usually underexplored in widely adopted service-oriented approaches (such as SOA-RM by OASIS, ITIL, and ArchiMate). Based on this, UFO-S was also applied in an ontological analysis of service modeling at ArchiMates Business layer. Such ontological analysis showed some limitations concerned to semantic ambiguity and lack of expressiveness for representing service offerings (and type thereof) and service agreements in SoEA. In order to address these limitations, three service modeling patterns (service offering type pattern, service offering pattern, and service agreement pattern) were proposed taking as basis UFO-S. The usefulness of these patterns for addressing these limitations was evidentiated by means of an empirical evaluation. Finally, we can say that, beyond offering a broad and well-founded theoretical foundation for service able to harmonize service perspectives, UFO-S presented benefits as a reference model in the analysis of SoEA structuring principles, and in the (re)design of service modeling languages