文档介绍：On the General Ontological Foundations of
Conceptual Modeling?
Giancarlo Guizzardi1, Heinrich Herre2,3, and Gerd Wagner4
1 Centre for Telematics and Information Technology, University of Twente,
Enschede, herlands
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2 Institut f¨urInformatik, University of Leipzig, Germany
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3 Institute for Formal Ontology and Medical Information Science (IFOMIS),
University of Leipzig, Germany
4 Faculty of Technology Management, Eindhoven University of Technology, The
Netherlands
G.******@,
http://tmit/staff/gwagner
Abstract. As pointed out in the pioneering work of [WSW99,EW01],
an upper level ontology allows to evaluate the ontological correctness of
a conceptual model and to develop guidelines how the constructs of a
conceptual modeling language should be used. In this paper we adopt
the General Ontological Language (GOL), proposed in [DHHS01], for
this purpose. We discuss a number of issues that arise when applying
the concepts of GOL to UML class diagrams as a conceptual modeling
language. We pare our ontological analysis of some parts of the
UML with the one proposed in [EW01].
1 Introduction
Conceptual modeling is concerned with identifying, analyzing and describing the
essential concepts and constraints of a domain with the help of a (diagrammatic)
modeling language that is based on a small set of basic meta-concepts (forming
a metamodel). Ontological modeling, on the other hand, is concerned with cap-
turing the relevant entities of a domain in an ontology of that domain using an
ontology specification language that is based on a small set of basic, domain-
independent ontological categories (forming an upper-level ontology). While con-
ceptual modeling languages (such as Entity-Relationship diagrams or UML class
diagrams)are evaluated on the basis of their essful use in (the early phases
of) information systems development, ontology specification languages and