=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-125/paper-5
|storemode=property
|title=A Unified Foundational Ontology and some Applications of it in Business Modeling
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-125/paper2.pdf
|volume=Vol-125
|authors=G. Guizzardi,G. Wagner
}}
==A Unified Foundational Ontology and some Applications of it in Business Modeling==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-125/paper2.pdf
A Unified Foundational Ontology and some
Applications of it in Business Modeling
Giancarlo Guizzardi1 and Gerd Wagner2
1
Centre for Telematics and Information Technology, Univ. of Twente
Enschede, The Netherlands
guizzard@cs.utwente.nl
2
Eindhoven Univ. of Technology, Faculty of Technology Management
Eindhoven, The Netherlands
G.Wagner@tm.tue.nl,
http://tmiswww.tm.tue.nl/staff/gwagner
Abstract: Foundational ontologies provide the basic concepts upon which any
domain-specific ontology is built. This paper presents a new foundational
ontology, UFO, and shows how it can be used as a guideline in business
modeling and for evaluating business modeling methods. UFO is derived from a
synthesis of two other foundational ontologies, GFO/GOL and
OntoClean/DOLCE. While their main areas of application are natural sciences
and linguistics/cognitive engineering, respectively, the main purpose of UFO is
to provide a foundation for conceptual modeling, including business modeling.
1 Introduction
A foundational ontology, sometimes also called ‘upper level ontology’, defines a
range of top-level domain-independent ontological categories, which form a general
foundation for more elaborated domain-specific ontologies. A well-known example of
a foundational ontology is the Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) ontology proposed by
Wand and Weber in a series of articles (e.g. Wand & Weber, 1990; 1995) on the basis
of the original metaphysical theory developed by Bunge (1977; 1979).
As has been shown in a large number of recent works (e.g., Green & Rosemann,
2000; Evermann & Wand, 2001; Guizzardi, Herre & Wagner, 2002a-b; Opdahl &
Henderson-Sellers, 2002) foundational ontologies can be used to evaluate conceptual
modeling languages and to develop guidelines for their use. Business modeling can be
viewed as a main application domain of conceptual modeling languages and methods.
In the Model-Driven Architecture approach of the OMG, a business model is called a
“computation-independent model” because it must not be expressed in terms of IT
concepts, but solely in terms of business language. The business domain, since it
contains so many different kinds of things, poses many challenges to foundational
ontologies.
A unified foundational ontology represents a synthesis of a selection of
foundational ontologies. Our main goal in making such a synthesis is to obtain a
foundational ontology that is tailored towards applications in conceptual modeling.
For this purpose we have to capture the ontological categories underlying natural
language and human cognition, which are also reflected in conceptual modelling
languages such as ER diagrams or UML class diagrams. In (Gangemi et al, 2002), this
approach is called ‘descriptive ontology’ as opposed to ‘prescriptive ontology’, which
claims to be ‘realistic’ and robust against the state of the art in scientific knowledge.
For UFO 0.1, the first experimental version of our Unified Foundational
Ontology (UFO), we combine the following two ontologies: (1) the General Formal
Ontology (GFO), which is underlying the General Ontological Language (GOL)
developed by the OntoMed research group at the University of Leipzig, Germany; see
www.ontomed.de and (Degen, Heller, Herre & Smith, 2001); (2) the OntoClean
ontology (Welty and Guarino, 2001) and the Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and
Cognitive Engineering (DOLCE) developed by the ISTC-CNR-LOA research group
in Italy, as part of WonderWeb Project; see http://wonderweb.semanticweb.org/.
Our choice is based on personal familiarity and preferences and not on an
evaluation of all alternatives. Nonetheless, in previous attempts, GFO has been proven
insightful in providing a principled foundation for analyzing and extending conceptual
modeling and ontology representation languages and constructs (Guizzardi, Herre &
Wagner, 2002a-b).
We have obtained our synthesis by: (i) selecting categories from the union of
both category sets; (ii) renaming certain terms in order to create a more ‘natural’
language; (iii) and adding some additional categories based on relevance for
conceptual modeling according to our experience. We also make references to BWW,
the Web ontology language OWL, the Unified Modeling Language (UML), the
terminology standard ISO1087-1:2000 (ISO, 2000), and to the Business Rules Team
submission to the OMG Business Semantics for Business Rules RFP (Chapin et al,
2004). For making a distinction between terms used differently in different
vocabularies, we use the XML namespace prefix syntax and write, e.g., “BWW:thing”
and “owl:Thing”.
We present UFO 0.1 both as a MOF/UML model and as a vocabulary in
structured English, similar to the BSBR Structured English of (Chapin et al, 2004).
The vocabulary consists of three kinds of entries marked up with different font styles:
term : a term in this font style denotes being of a type and is used to refer to
things of that type
name : a name of an individual or a type; when abc is a type term referring to
things of that type, abc is a name referring to the type itself
term1 relationship predicate term2 : an expression that denotes being of a
relationship type and that is used to refer to relationships of that type
A vocabulary entry may contain, additionally,
‘Corresponding terms’ (or ‘corresponding relationship type expressions’): terms
(or relationship type expressions) that are roughly equivalent
Examples
Constraints: logical statements that have to hold in any given ontology based on
UFO 0.1
When there is a primary source for a definition, we append it in brackets, like [based
on GFO].
UFO is divided into three incrementally layered compliance sets: (1) UFO-A defines
the core of UFO, excluding terms related to perdurants and terms related to the
spheres of intentional and social things; (2) UFO-B defines, as an increment to UFO-
A, terms related to perdurants; (3) UFO-C defines, as an increment to UFO-B, terms
related to the spheres of intentional and social things, including linguistic things.
This division reflects a certain stratification of our “world”. It also reflects different
degrees of scientific consensus: there is more consensus about the ontology of
endurants than about the ontology of perdurants, and there is more consensus about
the ontology of perdurants than about the ontology of intentional and social things.
We hope that this division into different compliance sets will facilitate both the
further evolution of UFO and the adoption of UFO in business modeling and ontology
engineering. In section 2 we present UFO-A 0.1, while UFO-B 0.1 and UFO-C 0.1
are presented in the sections 3 and 4, respectively. Section 5 illustrates how UFO can
be used to evaluate some business modeling methods. Section 6 concludes the article.
2 UFO-A 0.1 – the core of A Unified foundational Ontology
2.1 Things, Sets, Entities, Individuals and Types
We first present the upper part of UFO 0.1 as a MOF/UML model in Figure 1. Notice
the fundamental distinction made between sets and entities as things that are not sets
(called ‘urelements’ in GFO).
In structured English, the upper part of UFO 0.1 can be introduced as follows.
thing : anything perceivable or conceivable [ISO:object]. Corresponding terms:
GFO:entity; DOLCE:entity, owl:Thing; BSBR:thing
set : thing that has other things as members (in the sense of set theory)
thing is member of set : designated relationship that is irreflexive, asymmetric and
intransitive
member : role name that refers to the first argument of the thing is member of set
relationship type
set is subset of set : designated relationship that is reflexive, asymmetric and
transitive. Constraint: For all t:thing; s1, s2 : set – if t is member of s1 and s1 is
subset of s2, then t is member of s2
entity : thing that is not a set; neither the set-theoretic membership relation nor the
subset relation can unfold the internal structure of an entity [GFO:urelement]
type : entity that has an extension (being a set of entitys that are instances of it) and
an intension, which includes an applicability criterion for determining if an entity
is an instance of it; and which is captured by means of an axiomatic
specification, i.e., a set of axioms that may involve a number of other types
representing its essential features. A type is a space-time independent pattern of
features, which can be realized in a number of different individuals. [based on
GFO:universal]. Corresponding terms: UML:class; DOLCE:universal;
owl:Class; BSBR:”generic thing”
entity is instance of type : designated relationship (called classification)
instance : role name that refers to the first argument of the entity is instance of
type relationship type
set is extension of type : designated relationship. Constraint: For all o:entity, t:type,
s:set – if o is instance of t and s is extension of t, then o is member of s.
extension : role name that refers to the first argument of the set is extension of type
relationship type
type is subtype of type : designated relationship that is irreflexive, asymmetric and
transitive (also called generalization). Constraint: For all t1, t2 : type; s1, s2 : set
– if t1 is subtype of t2 and s1 is extension of t1 and s2 is extension of t2, then s1 is
subset of s2.
subtype : role name that refers to the first argument of the type is subtype of type
relationship type
individual : entity that is not a type. The relation between individual and type is one
of classification. Corresponding terms: GFO:individual; DOLCE:particular
thing is part of individual : designated relationship that is reflexive, asymmetric and
transitive (also called aggregation relationship).
part : role name that refers to the first argument of the thing is part of individual
relationship type
type is categorization type of type : designated relationship where the first
argument/role is a higher-order type whose instances form a subtype partition of
the second argument (also called categorization relationship). Examples:
BiologicalSpecies is categorization type of Animal; PassengerAircraftType is
categorization type of PassengerAircraft. Constraint: For all t1, t2, t3: type – if t3
is categorization type of t1 and t2 is instance of t3, then t2 is subtype of t1
categorization type : role name that refers to the first argument of the type is
categorization type of type relationship type. Corresponding names: GFO:higher-
order universal; BSBR:”categorization scheme”; UML:powertype
type is categorized by type : designated relationship that is the inverse of type is
categorization type of type. Corresponding relationship type expressions:
BSBR:”type has categorization-scheme”
*
Abstract
Thing
Thing
Part
* Member
{disjoint}
*
Instance Subset
Entity Set
1..* 1..*
Extension 1 *
{disjoint, complete} *
* 1..*
Entity
Individual Type ClassificationType
* Subtype
*
* 1
Figure 1: The upper part of UFO 0.1 as a MOF/UML model.
2.2 Different Kinds of Types
Based on (Wiggins, 2001; van Leeuwen, 1991; Gupta, 1980; Hirsch, 1982), we
distinguish between several different kinds of types, as shown in Figure 2. These
distinctions are elaborated in (Guizzardi et al, 2004a), in which we present a
philosophically and psychologically well-founded theory of types for conceptual
modeling. In (Guizzardi et al, 2004b), this theory is used to propose: (i) a profile for
UML whose elements represent finer-grained distinctions between different kinds of
types; (ii) a set of constraints defining the admissible relations between these
elements. One should refer to (Guizzardi et al, 2004a-b) for: (a) an in depth discussion
on the theory underlying these categories as well as the constraints on their relations;
(b) a formal characterization of the profile; (c) the application of the profile to propose
a ontological design pattern that addresses a recurrent problem in the practice of
conceptual modeling.
In structured English, the different kinds of types are defined as follows.
relationship type : type whose instances are relationships
sortal type : type that carries a criterion for determining the individuation, persistence
and identity of its instances. An identity criterion supports the judgment whether
two instances are the same. Every instance in a conceptual model must have an
identity and, hence, must be an instance of sortal type.
base type : sortal type that is rigid (all its instances are necessarily its instances)
and that supplies an identity criterion for its instances [OntoClean:type].
Examples: Mountain; Person. Corresponding terms: BWW:”natural kind”
phase type : sortal type that is anti-rigid (its instances could also not be instances of
it without loosing their identity) and that is an element of a subtype partition of a
base type [OntoClean:”phased sortal”]. Examples: Town and Metropolis are
phase subtypes of City; Baby, Teenager and Adult are phase subtypes of Person
role type : sortal type that is anti-rigid and for which there is a relationship type such
that it is the subtype of a base type formed by all instances participating in the
relationship type [OntoClean:role]. Examples: DestinationCity as role subtype of
City; Student as role subtype of Person
Role and phase types cannot supply an identity criterion for its instances. For this
reason, roles and phases must be subsumed by a base type from which an identity
criterion is inherited.
mixin type : type that is not a sortal type and can be partitioned into disjoint subtypes
which are sortal types (typically role types) with different identity criteria. Since
a mixin is a non-sortal it cannot have direct instances [OntoClean:non-sortal].
Examples: Object; Part; Customer; Product
Entity
Type
{disjoint}
SortalType MixinType
{disjoint}
BaseType RoleType PhaseType
Figure 2: Different kinds of types.
The theory of types which is part of UFO-A provides a foundation for a number
of modeling primitives that, albeit often used, are commonly defined in an ad hoc
manner in the practice of conceptual modeling (e.g. kind, phase or state, role, mixin).
In particular, this theory can be considered as an elaboration in the way types are
accounted for in the BWW approach. In one of the BWW papers (Evermann & Wand,
2001), it is proposed that a UML class should be used to represent a BWW-natural
kind (it should be equivalent to functional schema of a BWW-natural kind). As
discussed in (Guizzardi et al, 2004a), a natural kind is in the same ontological footing
as what is named here a Base type, i.e. it is a rigid type that provides an identity
criterion for its instances. It is been demonstrated in several works in the literature
(Welty & Guarino, 2001; Gupta, 1980; Wiggins, 2001; van Leeuwen, 1991; Guizzardi
et al, 2004a-b) that this kind of type construct constitutes only one of the sorts which
are necessary to represent the phenomena available in cognition and language. In
other words, a conceptual modeling construct representing a base type is only one of a
set of modeling constructs which should be available to the conceptual modeler.
2.3 Different Kinds of Individuals
We distinguish between a number of different kinds of individuals, as shown in
Figure 3.
Individual
{disjoint}
Perdurant Endurant
1
1..* bears
inheres in
Amount of
{disjoint} 1..*
Matter
{disjoint, Substance Moment
complete} Individual Individual
Physical
Object 1..*
{disjoint}
Relator Intrinsic
Quality
Moment
Figure 3: Different kinds of individuals.
In structured English, these different kinds of individuals are explained as follows.
endurant : individual that is wholly present whenever it is present, i.e. it does not
have temporal parts. An endurant is something which persists in time while
keeping its identity. Examples are a house, a person, the moon, a hole, the
redness of an apple and an amount of sand. [DOLCE]. Corresponding terms:
GFO:3D-individual
perdurant : individual that is composed of temporal parts; whenever a perdurant is
present, it is not the case that all its temporal parts are present. The distinction
between endurants and perdurants can be understood in terms of the intuitive
distinction between “objects”(things, entities) and “processes”(events) in
ordinary parlance. Examples of perdurants are a race, a conversation, the Second
World War and a business process [DOLCE]
substance individual : endurant that consists of matter (i.e., is `tangible’ or
concrete), possesses spatio-temporal properties and can exist by itself; that is, it
does not existentially depend on other endurants, except possibly on some of its
parts) [based on GFO:substance]. Corresponding terms: BWW:thing
moment individual : endurant that cannot exist by itself; that is, it depends on other
endurants, which are not among its parts [based on GFO:moment]
endurant bears moment individual : designated relationship [based on
GFO:”substance bears moment”]
physical object : substance individual that satisfies a condition of unity and for
which certain parts can change without affecting its identity
amount of matter : substance individual that does not satisfy a condition of unity;
typically referred to by means of mass nouns. Amounts of matter are, in general,
mereologically invariant, i.e., they cannot change any of their parts without
changing their identity [DOLCE]. Examples: water; gold; wood; milk; sand
intrinsic moment : moment individual that is existentially dependent on one single
individual
intrinsic moment inheres in endurant : designated relationship [GFO]
quality : intrinsic moment that inheres in exactly one endurant and can be mapped to
a value (quale) in a quality dimension (Gärdenfors, 2000). Corresponding terms:
GFO:quality; DOLCE:quality; BWW:”intrinsic property”. Examples: the color
(height, weight) of a physical object; an electric charge. Constraint: For all e1, e2
: endurant; q:quality — if q inheres in e1 and q inheres in e2, then e1 is equal to e2.
relational moment: moment individual that is existentially dependent on more than
one individual. Relational moments provide a foundation for the construction of
material relationships between individuals (Guizzardi, Herre & Wagner, 2002b).
The category of relational moments in UFO is based on the concept of a
[GFO:Relator]. The notion of relators is supported in several works in the
philosophical literature (Smith & Mulligan, 1986; Smith & Mulligan, 1986) and,
the position advocated here is that, it plays an important role in: (i) distinguishing
material relations such as ‘being married to’ and ‘studies at’ from their formal
counterparts (e.g. 5 is greater than 3, this day is part-of this month); (ii)
answering questions of the sort: what does it mean say that John is married to
Mary? Why is it true to say that Bill works for Company X but not for Company
Y? Corresponding terms: BWW:”mutual property”. Examples: a particular
employment (Susan is employed by IBM); a particular flight connection (LH403
flies from Berlin to Munich); a kiss; a handshake.
2.4 Some Applications of UFO-A 0.1 to Business Modeling
Problems
2.4.1 Modeling Customers
Most business information systems include a ‘business object class’ Customer for
representing the customers of the business. In figure 4-a, the role type Customer is
defined as a supertype of Person and Corporation. This model is deemed
ontologically incorrect for two reasons: first, not all persons are customers, i.e. it is
not the case that the extension of Person is necessarily included in the extension of
Customer. Moreover, an instance of Person is not necessarily (in the modal sense) a
Customer. Both arguments are also valid for Organization. In a series of papers (e.g.,
Steimann, 2000), Steimann discusses the difficulties in specifying supertypes for
Roles that can be filled by instances of disjoint types1. As a conclusion, he claims that
the solution to this problem lies in separating the hierarchies of role type and base
type (named natural type in the article) - a solution which strongly impacts the
metamodel of all major conceptual modeling language. By using the theory of types
underlying UFO-A we can show that this claim is not warranted and we are able to
propose a design pattern that can be used as an ontologically correct solution to this
recurrent problem (Guizzardi et al, 2004b).
Customer «mixinty pe»
Customer
«base ty pe» «base ty pe»
Person Corporation
Person Corporation «role ty pe» «role ty pe»
PersonalCustomer CorporateCustomer
Figure 4-a (left): An ontologically incorrect model of roles; Figure 5-b: An ontologically
correct version of (Fig.4-a) according to UFO 0.1.
In this example, Customer has in its extension individuals that that obey different
identity criteria, i.e., it is not the case that there is a single identity criteria which
applies both for Persons and Corporations. Customer is hence a mixin type (a non-
sortal) and, by definition, cannot supply an identity criterion for its instances. Since
every instance in the model must have an identity, thus, every instance of Customer
must be an instance of one of its subtypes (forming a partition) that carries an identity
criterion. For example, we can define the sortals PrivateCustomer and
CorporateCustomer as subtypes of Customer (fig.4-b). These sortals, in turn, carry the
(incompatible) identity criteria supplied by the base types Person and Corporation,
respectively.
2.4.2 Product Modeling
In many business information systems, both individual products and product types
have to be represented. In a prototypical case, the product individual type, whose
instances are identified with the help of serial numbers, is categorized by the
corresponding product model type, which is a 2nd order categorization type, whose
instances are subtypes of the product individual type. Figure 6 shows this situation for
1
This problem is also mentioned in (van Belle, 1999): “how would one model the customer
entity conceptually? The Customer as a supertype of Organisation and Person? The Customer
as a subtype of Organisation and Person? The Customer as a relationship between or
Organisation and (Organization or Person)?.”
the case of cars and car models. In a proposal for ontological foundations of the REA
model (Geert & McCarthy, 2000), the authors argue about the importance of the
type/categorization type distinction accounted here: “Economic Resources like
(especially) inventory have an instance/type definition problem that must be solved in
the REA ontology (or in any information system)… cars in an automobile dealership
would be modeled with instances (a car with a given engine#) …with classes of cars
(1975 Corvette) as type-images.”
«isClassif iedBy »
Car «classif icationty pe»
Color CarModel
* 1
VW Passat
«instance»
BMW Z3
«instance» 4711 : Car
Color = black
Figure 6: UML Product modeling with UFO-based stereotypes.
3 UFO-B 0.1 – Perdurants
A complete treatment of an ontology of perdurants requires a detailed discussion on
an ontology of temporal entities (chornoids) (Degen, Heller, Herre & Smith, 2001). In
this section, instead, we focus our attention to some basic categories of UFO-B 0.1
that will be used in section 4 in order to characterize some intentional entities and in
section 5 to review some enterprise modelling approaches. In the sequel we
(informally) discuss the following basic kinds of perdurants shown in Figure 6:
(atomic and complex) events and states.
state : perdurant that is homeomeric (each of its temporal parts belongs to the same
state type as the whole) [based on DOLCE]
event : perdurant that is related to exactly two states (its pre-state and its post-state).
An event is related to the states before and after it has happened.
atomic event : event that happens instantaneously, i.e. an event without duration.
[based on BWW:event and GFO:change]
complex event : event that is composed of two or more events. Examples: a football
game, a conversation, a race, a birthday party, a business process.
state is pre-state of event : designated relationship
state is post-state of event : designated relationship
Perdurant
(from UFO-A)
PreState
State Event 2..*
1 *
1 PostState *
Atomic Complex
Event Event
*
Figure 7: The perdurant categories of UFO-B 0.1
4 UFO-C 0.1 – Intentional, Social and Linguistic things
The ‘objective’ perdurant categories (atomic and complex) event and state defined in
UFO-B are essential concepts for process modeling, but they are not sufficient for
business process modeling, where intentional and social concepts such as action,
activity, and communication are needed. The following account of intentional and
social things is at an early stage of development and therefore rather incomplete.
Nevertheless, we think that it gives an impression of the range of ontological
categories that is needed to explain business process modeling.
physical agent : physical object that creates action events affecting other physical
objects, that perceives events, possibly created by other physical agents, and to
which we can ascribe a mental state. Examples: a dog; a human; a robot
action event : event that is created through the action of a physical agent
non-action event : event that is not created through an action of a physical agent
physical agent creates action event: designated relationship
physical agent perceives event: designated relationship
non-agentive object : physical object that is not a physical agent. Examples: a chair;
a mountain
mental moment : intrinsic moment that is existentially dependent on a particular
agent, being an inseparable part of its mental state. Examples: a thought; a
perception; a belief; a desire; an individual goal. Constraint: For all mm : mental
moment; e:endurant — if mm inheres in e then e is physical agent.
communicating physical agent : physical agent that communicates with other
communicating physical agents. Examples: a dog; a human; a communication-
enabled robot
institutional agent : institutional fact (Searle, 1995) that is an aggregate consisting of
communicating agents (its internal agents), which share a collective mental state,
and that acts, perceives and communicates through them. Examples: a business
unit; a voluntary association
agent : endurant that is either a physical agent or an institutional agent
communicating agent : agent that communicates with other communicating agents
social moment : relational individual that is existentially dependent on more than
one communicating agent. Examples: a commitment; a joint intention
5 Using UFO to Evaluate Business Modeling Methods
In the following subsections we briefly present some preliminary results in order to
exemplify how UFO can be used to evaluate some business modeling methods.
5.1 Enterprise Ontology
The Enterprise Ontology, which was developed in a project led by the AI
Applications Institute at the University of Edinburgh (see Uschold, King, Moralee &
Zorgios, 1998). Based on a simple upper-level ontology (‘meta-ontology’) consisting
of the three modeling concepts entity, relationship and actor, it provides definitions
for nearly 100 terms, both in natural language and in the formalism of Ontolingua.
For simplicity, the distinction between an entity (individual) and an entity type is
avoided. An agent (called actor) is defined as a special entitiy that can play an actor
role in certain relationships (such as in performs Activity, has Capability, etc.).
There is no independent concept of an event in the Enterprise Ontology: events
are defined as ‘a kind of activity’. Remarkably, the authors consider also events that
take place as a result of natural necessity (such as ‘water flowing down a hill’) as
activities of ‘inanimate actors’ (such as gravity).
The following points highlight some shortcomings of the Enterprise Ontology: (i)
For conceptual modeling, it is essential to distinguish between individuals and types;
(ii) It seems to be questionable to view natural forces that cause certain events to
happen, such as gravity, as actors/agents; in UFO 0.1 agents have a mental state and
are able to act (create action events), perceive and possibly to communicate; (iii)
Events should not be subsumed under activities. Rather, they should be first-class
citizens of the metamodel.
5.2 The Eriksson-Penker Business Extensions
In (Eriksson and Penker, 1999), it is proposed an approach to business modeling with
UML based on four primary concepts: resources, processes, goals, and rules. In this
proposal, there is no specific treatment of agents. They are subsumed, together with
‘material’,’products’ (substantial individuals), and ‘information’ (non-physical
endurant) under the concept of resources. This unfortunate subsumption of human
agents under the traditional `resource' metaphor prevents a proper treatment of many
agent-related concepts such as commitments, authorization, and
communication/interaction.
5.3 The REA (Resource-Event-Agent) Model
The REA framework, whose ontological foundations are defined in (Geert &
McCarthy, 2000), is based on a fundamental notion of an economic exchange. An
economic exchange comprises a pair of economic events: an inflow and an outflow
event. Economic agents participate in economic events and resources are affected
(e.g. produced, used, acquired) by these events. In UFO, an economic event is a type
of complex action and resource is a type of substantial individual (resources can be
both physical objects and amounts of matter). The notion of an economic agent cannot
be directly related to the notion of agent defined in UFO-C. In UFO, agent is a rigid
concept that denotes an entity to which we can ascribe a mental state, independently
whether the entity participates in some action. In REA, conversely, an entity is an
(economic) agent by virtue of its participation in an economic event. Hence, in REA,
agent is an anti-rigid concept akin the notion of role individual discussed here.
Despite of considering both individual and types, the authors do not elaborate on
the different sorts of types which are necessary for conceptual enterprise modeling
(see section 2.4.1).
An example of lack of ontological clarity is found when the authors mix the
notions of event and commitments. For instance, figure 5, commitment and economic
event are collapsed in one single type-image. Additionally, the relationships partner
and reserves (defined to hold between agent/commitment and resource/commitment,
respectively) are considered as subtypes of participation and stock-flow (defined
between agent/economic event and resource/economic event). In our framework,
whilst an economic event is a type of complex action, a commitment is a type of
relational moment. Examples of other types of social moments (a subtype of relational
moment) defined in REA include accountability, responsibility, assignment, and
custody.
Despite recognizing the importance of part-whole relations in the enterprise
domain (for example to model the relation between a resource and its parts), the
treatment offered is insufficient. The authors only briefly mention a relation of
composition that, together with other relations such as substitutes (meaning that a
resource can substitute another), is subsumed under the relation of linkage between
resources. No axiomatization for composition is provided. In a companion paper
(Guizzardi, Herre & Wagner, 2002b), we provide a formal characterization for
parthood and discuss different types of this relation which are important for
conceptual modeling.
6 Conclusions
The unified foundational ontology UFO 0.1 presented in this paper should be viewed
as an attempt to assemble a foundational ontology for conceptual modeling on the
basis of other, already well-established and philosophically justified foundational
ontologies. We have stratified UFO into three ontological layers in order to
distinguish its core, UFO-A, from the perdurant extension layer UFO-B and from the
agent extension layer UFO-C. Although there is not much consensus yet in the
literature regarding the ontology of agents, such an ontology is needed for building
the foundation of conceptual business process modeling. UFO-C 0.1 is a first attempt
to construct these foundations. We hope that we can validate and further improve it by
investigating its applicability to business modeling problems.
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