Abstract
Types, relations, and properties are fundamental for conceptual modeling and knowledge representation, being essential concepts 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 these concepts. As a consequence, there has been a lack of precise methodological support for users when choosing the best way to model specific domains through the application of these concepts, building sound taxonomic structures, and consistent relations. For the past two decades, a community of researchers has contributed to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) by consistently putting together theories from areas such as formal ontology, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophical logic. These results are collected into a conceptual modeling language dubbed OntoUML, whose constructs and semantically-motivated syntactical constraints reflect 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. In addition, they have driven the development of numerous applications that assist OntoUML users to build, verify, and validate their models, as well as to use them in the design of ontology-driven applications.
These experiences exposed improvement opportunities for the OntoUML language, its underlying theory, UFO, and the suite of OntoUML-based applications. In this work, we revisit the foundations of these decades of research bringing together improvements to the theory (UFO), the language (OntoUML), and their software applications. In the context of UFO, we revisit its theories of types and relations formally defining improvements in first-order modal logics. In OntoUML, we conduct a language engineering step to reflect the theory’s improvements into the language’s constructs and constraints. Finally, we concretize these contributions by developing a new software solution for model design and verification built on a novel microservice-oriented architecture for OntoUML-based applications.