Abstract
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in approaches that employ ontological models as theoretical tools for analyzing and improving conceptual modeling languages. In this paper we present a philosophically and cognitively well-founded formal ontology which has been developed with the special purpose of serving as a foundation for general conceptual modeling languages. Furthermore, we demonstrate how this foundational ontology named the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) has been used to evaluate and redesign the metamodel of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) for the purpose of conceptual modeling.
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Notes
- 1.
Red is used here as an object universal whose instances are particulars like a red apple x, not as a quality universal whose instances are particulars such as the specific redness of x (Guizzardi, 2005).
- 2.
A relational image function is formally defined as follows: Let R be a binary relation defined for the two sets X and Y. The function Im with signature Im(_,_): \({\textbf{X}}\, \times ({\textbf{X}} \Leftrightarrow {\textbf{Y}}) \boldsymbol{\to \wp} ({\textbf{Y}})\) is defined as \({\textbf{Im}}({\textbf{x}}{\textrm{,}}{\textbf{R}}) = \left\{ {{\textbf{y}}|({\textbf{x,y}}) \in {\textbf{R}}} \right\}\).
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Guizzardi, G., Wagner, G. (2010). Using the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) as a Foundation for General Conceptual Modeling Languages. In: Poli, R., Healy, M., Kameas, A. (eds) Theory and Applications of Ontology: Computer Applications. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8847-5_8
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