Endurant Types in Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling: Towards OntoUML 2.0

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. This ontology has led to the development of an Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling language dubbed OntoUML, reflecting the ontological micro-theories comprising UFO. Over the years, UFO and OntoUML have been successfully employed in a number of academic, industrial and governmental settings to create conceptual models in a variety of different domains. These experiences have pointed out to opportunities of improvement not only to the language itself but also to its underlying theory. In this paper, we take the first step in that direction by revising the theory of types in UFO in response to empirical evidence. The new version of this theory shows that many of the meta-types present in OntoUML (differentiating Kinds, Roles, Phases, Mixins, etc.) 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 a formal characterization of this fragment of the theory, which is then used to advance a metamodel for OntoUML 2.0. Finally, we propose a computational support tool implementing this updated metamodel

X-ray powder diffraction of high-absorption materials at the XRD1 beamline off the best conditions: Application to (Gd,Nd)5Si4 compounds

Representative compounds of the new family of magnetic materials Gd5-xNdxSi4 were analyzed by X-ray diffraction at the XRD1 beamline at LNLS. To reduce X-ray absorption, thin layers of the powder samples were mounted outside the capillaries and measured in Debye-Scherrer geometry as usual. The X-ray diffraction analyses and the magnetometry results indicate that the behavior of the magnetic transition temperature as a function of Nd content may be directly related to the average of the four smallest interatomic distances between different rare earth sites of the majority phase of each compound. The quality and consistency of the results show that the XRD1 beamline is able to perform satisfactory X-ray diffraction experiments on high-absorption materials even off the best conditions.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, 3 table

White dwarfs with a surface electrical charge distribution: Equilibrium and stability

The equilibrium configuration and the radial stability of white dwarfs composed of charged perfect fluid are investigated. These cases are analyzed through the results obtained from the solution of the hydrostatic equilibrium equation. We regard that the fluid pressure and the fluid energy density follow the relation of a fully degenerate electron gas. For the electric charge distribution in the object, we consider that it is centralized only close to the white dwarfs' surfaces. We obtain larger and more massive white dwarfs when the total electric charge is increased. To appreciate the effects of the electric charge in the structure of the star, we found that it must be in the order of $10^{20}\,[{\rm C}]$ with which the electric field is about $10^{16}\,[{\rm V/cm}]$. For white dwarfs with electric fields close to the Schwinger limit, we obtain masses around $2\,M_{\odot}$. We also found that in a system constituted by charged static equilibrium configurations, the maximum mass point found on it marks the onset of the instability. This indicates that the necessary and sufficient conditions to recognize regions constituted by stable and unstable equilibrium configurations against small radial perturbations are respectively $dM/d\rho_c>0$ and $dM/d\rho_c<0$.Comment: This is a preprint. The original paper will be published in EPJ