Showing papers by "Giancarlo Guizzardi published in 2017"

From reference ontologies to ontology patterns and back

Abstract: Building proper reference ontologies is a hard task. There are a number of methods and tools that traditionally have been used to support this task. These include the use of foundational theories, the reuse of domain and core ontologies, the adoption of development methods, as well as the support of proper software tools. In this context, an approach that has gained increasing attention in recent years is the systematic application of ontology patterns . However, a pattern-based approach to ontology engineering requires: the existence of a set of suitable patterns that can be reused in the construction of new ontologies; a proper methodological support for eliciting these patterns, as well as for applying them in the construction of these new models. The goal of this paper is twofold: (i) firstly, we present an approach for deriving conceptual ontology patterns from ontologies. These patterns are derived from ontologies of different generality levels, ranging from foundational to domain ontologies; (ii) secondly, we present guidelines that describe how these patterns can be applied in combination for building reference domain ontologies in a reuse-oriented process. In summary, this paper is about the construction of ontology patterns from ontologies, as well as the construction of ontologies from ontology patterns.

Multi-level ontology-based conceptual modeling

Abstract: Since the late 1980s, there has been a growing interest in the use of foundational ontologies to provide a sound theoretical basis for the discipline of conceptual modeling. This has led to the development of ontology-based conceptual modeling techniques whose modeling primitives reflect the conceptual categories defined in a foundational ontology. The ontology-based conceptual modeling language OntoUML, for example, incorporates the distinctions underlying the taxonomy of types in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) (e.g., kinds, phases, roles, mixins, etc.). This approach has focused so far on the support to types whose instances are individuals in the subject domain, with no provision for types of types (or categories of categories). In this paper we address this limitation by extending the Unified Foundational Ontology with the MLT multi-level theory. The UFO-MLT combination serves as a foundation for conceptual models that can benefit from the ontological distinctions of UFO as well as MLT's basic concepts and patterns for multi-level modeling. We discuss the impact of the extended foundation to multi-level conceptual modeling.

An Ontological Analysis of Value Propositions

Abstract: In competitive markets, companies need well-designed business strategies if they seek to grow and obtain sustainable competitive advantage. At the core of a successful business strategy there is a carefully crafted value proposition, which ultimately defines what a company delivers to its customers. Despite their widely recognized importance, there is however little agreement on what exactly value propositions are. This lack of conceptual clarity harms the communication among stakeholders and the harmonization of current business strategy theories and strategy support frameworks. Furthermore, it hinders the development of systematic methodologies for crafting value propositions, as well as adequate support for representing and analyzing them. In this paper, we present an ontological analysis of value propositions based on a review of most relevant business and marketing theories and on previous work on value ascription, grounded in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). Our investigation clarifies how value propositions are different from value presentations, and shows the difference between value propositions at the business level from those related to specific offerings.

From an Ontology of Service Contracts to Contract Modeling in Enterprise Architecture

Abstract: Service contracts bind parties legally, regulating their behavior in the scope of a (business) service relationship. Given that there are legal consequences attached to service contracts, understanding the elements of a contract is key to managing services in an enterprise. After all, provisions in a service contract establish obligations and rights for service providers and customers that must be respected in service delivery. The importance of service contracts to service provisioning in an enterprise has motivated us to investigate their representation in enterprise models. We have observed that approaches fall into two extremes of a spectrum. Some approaches, such as ArchiMate, offer an opaque "contract" construct, not revealing the rights and obligations in the scope of the governed service relationship. Other approaches, under the umbrella term "contract languages", are devoted exactly to the formal representation of the contents of contracts. Despite the applications of contract languages, they operate at a level of detail that does not match that of enterprise architecture models. In this paper, we explore the gap between these two extremes. We address the representation of service contract elements with a systematic approach: we first propose a well-founded service contract ontology, and then extend the ArchiMate language to reflect the elements of the service contract ontology. The applicability of the proposed extension is assessed in the representation of a real-world cloud service contract.

Towards an Ontology of Goal-Oriented Requirements

Abstract: Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) has grown into an important area of research in the past decades. Still, some of its corners remain dark, since different GORE languages do not provide a well-founded conceptualization of the domain and are not consensual. This may lead to ambiguous or weak understanding of GORE concepts. In this paper, we introduce the Goal-Oriented Requirements Ontology (GORO), a domain ontology founded on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) that intends to represent the nature and relations of concepts surrounding the GORE domain. We use GORO to explore and clarify the semantics used, sometimes implicitly, by well-known GORE languages.

Formal definition of a general ontology pattern language using a graph grammar

Abstract: In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of ontologica! theories in the philosophical sense (Foundational Ontologies) to analyze and (re)design conceptual modeling languages. This paper is about an ontologically well-founded conceptual modeling language in this tradition, termed OntoUML. This language embeds a number of ontological patterns that reflect the micro-theories comprising a particular foundational ontology named UFO. We here (re)define OntoUML as a formal graph grammar and demonstrate how the models of this language can be constructed by the combined application of ontological patterns following a number of graph transformation rules. As a result, we obtain a version of this language fully defined as a formal Ontology Pattern Grammar. In other words, this paper presents a formal definition of OntoUML that is both explicit in terms of the ontological patterns that it incorporates and is completely independent of the UML meta-model.

Representing the UFO-B foundational ontology of events in SROIQ

Abstract: In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the application of foundational ontologies, i.e., formal ontological theories in the philosophical sense, to provide a theoretically sound foundation for improving the theory and practice of conceptual modeling and knowledge representation. This paper addresses one particular foundational theory of events termed UFO-B, which has been successfully employed as a reference model for addressing problems from complex media management, enterprise architecture, software engineering, and modeling of events in petroleum exploration. Despite that, there is still no formalization of UFO-B in a decidable knowledge representation language that could support reasoning about complex events and event relations. We address this gap by proposing a number of alternative translations from UFO-B’s original axiomatization (in first-order logic and in the Alloy formal language) to the description logic SROIQ, which is the formal underpinning of OWL 2 DL. Additionally, to support practical applications, we translated these SROIQ theories to OWL 2 DL TBoxes, which were validated by showing that all the intended models of UFO-B (the logical models of the UFO-B specification in Alloy) that we generated are consistent with these UFO-B TBoxes.

“Is It a Fleet or a Collection of Ships?”: Ontological Anti-patterns in the Modeling of Part-Whole Relations

Abstract: Over the years, there is a growing interest in employing theories from philosophical ontology, cognitive science and linguistics to devise theoretical, methodological and computational tools for information systems engineering, in general, and for conceptual modeling, in particular. In this paper, we discuss one particular kind of such tools, namely, ontological anti-patterns. Ontological anti-patterns are error-problem modeling structures that can create a deviation between the possible and the intended interpretations of a model. In this paper, we present two empirically elicited ontological anti-patterns related to the modeling of part-whole relations. In particular, these anti-patterns identify possible mistakes in the modeling of collectives (complex entities that have a uniform role-based structure) and functional complexes (complex entities composed of functional parts). Besides identifying these anti-patterns, the paper presents a series of rectification plans that can be used to eliminate their occurrence in models. Finally, we present a model-based computational tool that supports the automated detection, analysis and elimination of these anti-patterns.

Towards a first-order modal formalisation of the unified foundational ontology

Abstract: In this paper, we present a succinct formalisation of the main categories of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) by summarising and simplifying a fragment of the version of [Gui05]. In this version, we show that the use first-order modal logic with no higher-order constructs suffices for many modelling tasks. We focus here on the case of universals. We slightly modify the original version of UFO by presenting new definitions of the intension and of the extension of universals and by approaching a taxonomy of universals.

Revisiting the DEMO Transaction Pattern with the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO)

Abstract: In this paper, we revisit the DEMO transaction pattern in light of the domain-independent system of categories put forth by the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). In this process, we treat social relationships in the scope of the DEMO transactions as objectified social entities, and thereby separate the behavioural and structural aspects of the transaction pattern and clarify their interplay. Further, we represent the pattern in the OntoUML ontology-driven conceptual modeling language. The revisited pattern can be embedded in broader enterprise ontologies and reference conceptual models based in UML. The proposed OntoUML models can also be further refined to account for and consider different organizational implementations of business transactions. We demonstrate the proposed representation by applying it to OMGs EU-Rent case.

Exploring the Role of Enterprise Architecture Models in the Modularization of an Ontology Network: A Case in the Public Security Domain

Abstract: Ontologies play a key role in semanticinteroperability projects, capturing the conceptualizationunderlying the various systems to be integrated. In the case oflarge information systems landscapes, a single monolithicontology often becomes hard to design and maintain. In thissetting, it is common to divide the ontological model inconsistently interlinked modular ontologies, forming anontology network. This paper explores the role of EnterpriseArchitecture (EA) models in defining the ontologies in anontology network. We report on an exploratory study in thescope of an e-Government interoperability project in the areaof public security. In the reported study, an EA model providesguidance in the modularization of the ontology network.

Advances in Enterprise Engineering XI

Abstract: This book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th Enterprise Engineering Working Conference, EEWC 2017, held in Antwerp, Belgium, in May 2017. EEWC aims at addressing the challenges that modern and complex enterprises are facing in a rapidly changing world. The participants of the working conference share a belief that dealing with these challenges requires rigorous and scientific solutions, focusing on the design and engineering of enterprises. The goal of EEWC is to stimulate interaction between the different stakeholders, scientists as well as practitioners, interested in making Enterprise Engineering a reality. The 12 full papers and 4 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: formalisms; standards and laws; business processes; normalized systems and evolvability; ontologies; and organization design.

Towards a Cognitive Semantics of Types

Abstract: Types are a crucial concept in conceptual modelling, logic, and knowledge representation as they are an ubiquitous device to understand and formalise the classification of objects. We propose a logical treatment of types based on a cognitively inspired modelling that accounts for the amount of information that is actually available to a certain agent in the task of classification. We develop a predicative modal logic whose semantics is based on conceptual spaces that model the actual information that a cognitive agent has about objects, types, and the classification of an object under a certain type. In particular, we account for possible failures in the classification, for the lack of sufficient information, and for some aspects related to vagueness.

Empirically Evaluating Three Proposals for Representing Changes in OWL2.

Abstract: In almost all domains in practice, it is fundamental to properly represent entities amenable to changes. For instance, in business analytics, we must be able to reason with large amounts of time-changing KPI (key performance indicators) data. For this reason, general-purpose practical knowledge representation frameworks must be able to support the representation of temporally changing information and in a way that affords decidable automated reasoning. In this paper, we address the issue of representing entities amenable to intrinsic or extrinsic changes in OWL2. These sources of change are illustrated in a simplified model of the scholar domain. We then propose three strategies to represent entities amenable to changes as well as their changes. In particular, we do that by employing strategies that are based on a philosophical stance called perdurantism, which sees all individuals as 4D entities, i.e., as individuals that unfold in time as well as in space. Finally, we compare these three alternatives by generating synthetic instances and performing an empirical evaluation of reasoning tasks.

Where Enterprise Architecture and Early Ontology Engineering Meet: A Case Study in the Public Security Domain

Abstract: This paper explores the use of „process-related models‟ – such as Enterprise Architecture (EA) models – as non-ontological resources (NORs) in the Ontology Engineering (OE) trajectory. These models are commonly available in enterprise repositories in process-rich social domains (e.g., e-Government, finance, software engineering, manufacturing), and serve as valuable sources of consolidated knowledge. We focus on the role of EA models in supporting what we are naming here Early Ontology Engineering, comprising the phases of purpose and scope identification as well as the identification of functional requirements for creating domain ontologies. This is because these models characterize, among other aspects, the organizational context and the business motivations/goals. Therefore, they may facilitate the identification of intended uses/purpose of an ontology to be integrated to the EA, as a means to address goals of the organization stakeholders. We show how this approach is being applied in a real-world e-Government project in the Public Security Domain.