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        <article-title>The Impact of an Ontological Theory of Relations in Enterprise Modeling</article-title>
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        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>João Paulo A. Almeida</string-name>
          <email>jpalmeida@ieee.org</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
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          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Ontology &amp; Conceptual Modeling Research Group (NEMO), Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES)</institution>
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          <country country="BR">Brazil</country>
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      <abstract>
        <p>Conceptual models capture invariant aspects of entities in the domain of inquiry along with the relations they establish. Explicit attention to these relations is a key aspect of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO), which proposes the reification of mediating entities called relators. Examples of relators include marriages, enrollments and employments. Relators 'connect' entities in the scope of a relationship, and become the focus of our modeling effort when applying the relator pattern. This pattern allow us to zoom in on what would usually be represented as an opaque predicate (e.g., 'married to', 'enrolled in', 'employed by'). As a consequence, we may identify roles played by the relata in the scope of the relation, we may explore the various types of relators (in relator taxonomies), as well as identify the decomposition of relators into parts (relational aspects that inhere in an entity but depend on another related entity). Over the years, we have applied the notion of relator and the relator pattern in a number of organizational domains. This has led to improvements to enterprise modeling, with consequences to the representation of phenomena involving services, service networks, contracts, trust, value and risk. A number of examples from ArchiMate (and its various extensions) reveal the benefits of applying UFO's micro-theory of relators to enterprise modeling.</p>
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