Premises and Foundations of Conceptual Modelling

Abstract

This chapter starts by presenting the ontological (in the philosophical sense) premises for conceptual modelling. These involve agreeing that reality can be discretized into separate entities, and that these entities can be organized into categories. Then we move on to describe the connections between conceptual modelling and natural language, and how by using conceptual models we can express different linguistic constructs, including existence (“there is a person”), identity (“Isabel is my wife”), predication (“Isabel is tall”), classification (“Isabel is a person”) and subsumption (“A dog is an animal”). Finally, we explain that models are usually expressed by using modelling languages, such as ConML (www.conml.org), which are quite formal, comprising very strict lexical, syntactical and semantic rules, and even affecting the way in which we conceptualize the world.