Conceptual Modeling

Relationships are an integral part of the design of a database. Comparing and integrating relationships from heterogeneous databases requires that the relationships be mapped to each other or to a common classification. Identifying similarities and resolving differences in relationships across large data sources is a resource-intensive task that could benefit greatly from semi-automated approaches. A prerequisite to developing such approaches is a clear understanding of the semantics of relationships used in database design. This research presents a layered ontology for classifying the semantics of relationships. It consists of a core layer that captures the fundamental types of relationships between entities. A middle layer provides the internal context, obtained from entities surrounding the relationship, to interpret the fundamental types. The outer layer allows further interpretation using the external context, that is, the domain in which a relationship is being used. An initial assessment on relationships from a variety of application domains demonstrates that the ontology can be adequate and useful for comparing relationships across databases.

Despite reputation deeply influences system providers and users interactions (e.g. in e-commerce), today implementations of reputation systems are far from being satisfactory. Reputation systems implemented so far for ecommerce are very simple and lack in showing relevant features of the service: on the one hand the representation of reputation does not distinguish different attributes concerning the entity holding the reputation; on the other hand the information used to built reputation is completely subjective, that is entirely rely on users' feedbacks, even concerning attributes that could be objectively measured. The principal cause of the problems above is that software engineering methodologies captures high level functional requirements and detail them down to system implementation but not on the reputation system side. In the present paper we start to tackle the highlighted problems by proposing an extension of Value Delivery Modeling Language and Service Modeling Language toward the representation of reputation systems concepts. The aim is to provide a model to represent reputation requirements of the system-to-be from the very beginning in the software development.

This paper presents an evaluation of feature modeling tools. The purpose of the evaluation was to gain insight in the aspects that influence the quality and more in the particular usability. The evaluation focused on the quality criteria: usability, safety, and the support for functional usability requirements. The study involved 9 feature-modeling tools and was done using an experimental evaluation and an investigation by the authors of the paper. From the results, recommendations are formulated that can be taken into consideration in future tool design for these kind of modeling tools.

This paper presents an ontology architecture concept for the European Space Agency‘s (ESA) Space Situational Awareness (SSA) Program. It incorporates the author‘s domain ontology, The Space Situational Awareness Ontology and related ontology work. I summarize computational ontology, discuss the segments of ESA SSA, and introduce an option for a modular ontology framework reflecting the divisions of the SSA program. Among other things, ontologies are used for data sharing and integration. By applying ontology to ESA data, the ESA may better achieve its integration and innovation goals, while simultaneously improving the state of peaceful SSA.

Decisional systems are crucial for enterprise improvement. They allow the consolidation of heterogeneous data from distributed enterprise data stores into strategic indicators. An essential component of this data consolidation is the Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) process. In the research literature there has been very few work defining conceptual models for ETL processes. At the same time, there are currently many tools that manage such processes. However, each tool uses its own model, which is not necessarily able to communicate with the models of other tools. In this paper, we propose a platform-independent conceptual model of ETL processes based on the Business Process Model Notation (BPMN) standard. We also show how such a conceptual model can be implemented using Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), a standard executable language for specifying interactions with web services.

Data warehousing and electronic-commerce are two of the most rapidly expanding fields in recent information technologies. In this paper, we discuss the design of data warehouses for e-commerce environment. We discuss requirement analysis, logical design, and physical design issues in e-commerce environments. We have collected an extensive set of interesting OLAP queries for e-commerce environments, and classified them into categories. Based on these OLAP queries, we illustrate our design with data warehouse bus architecture, dimension table structures, a base star schema, and an aggregation star schema. We finally present various physical design considerations for implementing the dimensional models. We believe that our collection of OLAP queries and dimensional models would be very useful in developing any real-world data warehouses in e-commerce environments.

The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) was developed over the last two decades by consistently putting together theories from areas such as formal ontology in philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophical logics. It comprises a number of micro-theories addressing fundamental conceptual modeling notions, including entity types and relationship types. The aim of this paper is to summarize the current state of UFO, presenting a formalization of the ontology, along with the analysis of a number of cases to illustrate the application of UFO and facilitate its comparison with other foundational ontologies in this special issue. (The cases originate from the First FOUST Workshop – the Foundational Stance, an international forum dedicated to Foundational Ontology research.)

This paper first examines crime situation in Benin metropolis using questionnaire to elicit information from the public and the police. Result shows that crime is on the rise and that the police are handicapped in managing it because of the obsolete methods and resources at their disposal. It also reveals that members of the public have no confidence in the police force as 80% do not report cases for fear of exposure to the informant to the criminal. In the light of these situations, the second part of the paper looks at the possibility of utilizing GIS for effective management of crime in Nigeria. This option was explored by showing the procedural method of creating 1) digital landuse map showing the crime locations, 2) crime geo-spatial database, and 3) spatial analysis such as query and buffering using ILWIS and ArcGIS software and GPS. The result of buffering analysis shows crime hotspots, areas deficient in security outfit, areas of overlap and areas requiring constant police patrol. The study proves that GIS can give a better synoptic perspective to crime study, analysis, mapping, proactive decision making and prevention of crime. It however suggests that migrating from traditional method of crime management to GIS demands capacity building in the area of personnel, laboratory and facilities backed up with policy statement.

Electricity is an indispensable amenity in present society. Among all those energy resources, coal is readily available all over the world and has risen only moderately in price compared with other fuel sources. As a result, coal-fired power plant remains to be a fundamental element of the world's energy supply. IGCC, abbreviation of Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle, is one of the primary designs for the power-generation market from coal-gasification. This work presents a in the proposed process, diluted hydrogen is combusted in a gas turbine. Heat integration is central to the design. Thus far, the SGR process and the HGD unit are not commercially available. To establish a benchmark. Some thermodynamic inefficiencies were found to shift from the gas turbine to the steam cycle and redox system, while the net efficiency remained almost the same. A process simulation was undertaken, using Aspen Plus and the engineering equation solver (EES).The The model has been developed using Aspen Hysys® and Aspen Plus®. Parts of it have been developed in Matlab, which is mainly used for artificial neural network (ANN) training and parameters estimation. Predicted results of clean gas composition and generated power present a good agreement with industrial data. This study is aimed at obtaining a support tool for optimal solutions assessment of different gasification plant configurations, under different input data sets.

n this thesis, we aim at contributing to the theory of conceptual modeling and ontology representation. Our main objective here is to provide ontological foundations for the most fundamental concepts in conceptual modeling. These foundations comprise a number of ontological theories, which are built on established work on philosophical ontology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of language and linguistics. Together these theories amount to a system of categories and formal relations known as a foundational ontology

While there have been dramatic increases in the use of digital technologies for information storage, processing and delivery over the last twenty years, the affordances of paper have ensured its retention as a key information medium. In this book we review a wide variety of projects and technological developments for bridging the paper-digital divide. We present our information-centric approach for a tight integration of paper and digital information that is based on a general cross-media information platform. Different innovative augmented paper applications that have been developed based on our interactive paper platform and Anoto Digital Pen and Paper technology are introduced. For example, these applications include a mobile interactive paper-based tourist information system (EdFest) and a paper-digital presentation tool (PaperPoint). Challenges and solutions for new forms of interactive paper and cross-media publishing are discussed. The book is targeted at developers and researchers in information systems, hypermedia and human computer interaction, professionals from the printing and publishing industry as well as readers with a general interest in the future of paper.

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Social accounts of technological change make the flexibility and openness of interpretations the starting point of an argument against technological determinism. They suggest that technological change unfolds in the semantic domain, but they focus on the social processes around the interpretations of new technologies, and do not address the conceptual processes of change in interpretations. The dissertation presents an empirically grounded case study of the design process of an open-source online software platform based on the framework of distributed cognition to argue that the cognitive perspective is needed for understanding innovation in software, because it allows us to describe the reflexive and expansive contribution of conceptual processes to new software and the significance of professional epistemic practices in framing the direction of innovation. The framework of distributed cognition brings the social and cognitive perspectives together on account of its understanding of conceptual processes as distributed over time, among people, and between humans and artifacts. The dissertation argues that an evolving open-source software landscape became translated into the open-ended local design space of a new software project in a process of infrastructural implosion, and the design space prompted participants to outline and pursue epistemic strategies of sense-making and learning about the contexts of use. The result was a process of conceptual modeling, which resulted in a conceptually novel user interface. Prototyping professional practices of user-centered design lent directionality to this conceptual process in terms of a focus on individual activities with the user interface. Social approaches to software design under the broad umbrella of human-centered computing have been seeking to inform the design on the basis of empirical contributions about a social context. The analysis has shown that empirical engagement with the contexts of use followed from conceptual modeling, and concern about real world contexts was aligned with the user-centered direction that design was taking. I also point out a social-technical gap in the design process in connection with the repeated performance challenges that the platform was facing, and describe the possibility of a social-technical imagination.

This paper is dedicated to Nicola Guarino, on the occasion of his 65th birthday. Nicola has made seminal contributions to Conceptual Modeling that include some of the greatest advances in this field of research over the past thirty years. The main objective of this paper is to present some of Nicola’s contributions and highlight their importance to Conceptual Modeling.

Reification is a standard technique in conceptual modeling, which consists of including in the domain of discourse entities that may otherwise be hidden or implicit. However, deciding what should be reified is not always easy. Recent work on formal ontology offers us a simple answer: put in the domain of discourse those entities that are responsible for the (alleged) truth of our propositions. These are called truthmakers. Re-visiting previous work, we propose in this paper a systematic analysis of truthmaking patterns for properties and relations based on the ontological nature of their truthmakers. Truthmaking patterns will be presented as generalization of reification patterns, accounting for the fact that, in some cases, we do not reify a property or a relationship directly, but we rather reify its truthmakers.

We describe an algorithmic method for transforming a Binary-Relationship (BR) conceptual schema to an Object-Ooriented (OO) database schema. The BR schema is a semantically rich diagram that represents the reality being modeled in terms of objects, relationships and constraints. It is easy to understand and serves as a communication tool between users and designers. Therefore it can be created in the early stages of system development, and later on be transformed into a specific OO database schema.
The transformation method employs a multi-stage algorithm, which first identifies the essential objects in the BR schema, together with their relationships and constraints. These are then mapped to object classes, attributes, and constraints, maintaining the semantics and all types of constraints present in the conceptual schema.

System-based decision-making functionality has matured over the last decade due to the constant evolution of technological decision execution capabilities. Intelligent agents, cyber-physical systems employing automated and autonomous mechanisms and components, and recent breakthroughs of household robotics require standardized and formalized automated decision making (DM) process design. Employing an integrated systems thinking approach, we propose a model-based approach which integrates decision-support and decision-making mechanisms into system models. Our formal conceptual metamodel streamlines a standard, generic DM process, enabling the coordination and consolidation of local system-based decisions in a loosely coordinated system-of-systems or a complex system of autonomous agents into a coherent, environment-aware global decision. Our framework utilizes Object Process Methodology -OPMa robust conceptual modeling framework for complex system and process modeling and design.

In his article entitled “On Ontological Foundations of Conceptual Modeling” (henceforth OFCM), Boris Wyssusek reviews several approaches that have the common objective of investigating how results from areas such as formal ontology in philosophy, cognitive science, semiotics and linguistics can be employed in the construction of a well-founded theoretical basis for the discipline of conceptual modeling in computer science. Despite the title of his essay, which may let the reader think of an analysis of what the ontological foundations of conceptual modeling are, Wyssusek wonders whether the very idea makes sense, concluding very negatively that “the project of ontology-based conceptual modeling appears to be impossible in principle”. We shall bring here arguments against such conclusion, hoping to convince the readers that the ontology-driven approach to conceptual modeling is well and alive, and that it dramatically improves the quality of information systems.

Ontology-driven conceptual models are widely used to capture information about complex and critical domains. Therefore, it is essential for these models to be comprehensible and cognitively tractable. Over the years, different techniques for complexity management in conceptual models have been suggested. Among these, a prominent strategy is model abstraction. This work extends an existing strategy for model abstraction of OntoUML models that proposes a set of graph-rewriting rules leveraging on the ontological semantics of that language. That original work, however, only addresses a set of the ontological notions covered in that language. We review and extend that rule set to cover more generally types of objects, aspects, events, and their parts.

Finance and economics are wide domains, where ontologies are useful
instruments for dealing with semantic interoperability and information integration problems, as well as improving communication and problem solving among people. In particular, reference ontologies have been widely recognized as powerful tools for representing a model of consensus within a community to support communication, meaning negotiation, consensus establishment, as well as semantic interoperability and information integration. In domains like economics and finance, which are too large and complex to be represented as a single, large and monolithic ontology, it is necessary to create an ontological framework, built incrementally and in an integrated way, as a network. Therefore, in this paper we introduce OntoFINE, an Ontology Network in Finance and Economics that organizes and integrates knowledge in the realm on finance and economics, serving
as a basis to several applications. We discuss the development of OntoFINE and present some of its applications.

Functional Size Measurement (FSM) methods are intended to measure the size of software by quantifying the functional user requirements of the software. The capability to accurately quantify the size of software in an early stage of the development lifecycle is critical to software project managers for evaluating risks, developing project estimates and having early project indicators. In this paper, we present OO-Method Function Points (OOmFP), which is a new FSM method for object-oriented systems that is based on measuring conceptual schemas. OOmFP is presented following the steps of a process model for software measurement. Using this process model, we present the design of the measurement method, its application in a case study, and the analysis of different evaluation types that can be carried out to validate the method and to verify its application and results.

Conceptualization of information allows improved visualization and manipulation of large amounts of data. Especially in digitization of cultural heritage and when aiming at presenting more than one monuments, abstraction of information becomes the key solution. Our proposed application aims to present the main archaeological monuments of Crete through a conceptual 3D model and their evolution through time. The technical implementation is based on WebGL allowing the user to navigate among the main monuments and approach them gradually and interactively through different levels of detail. Furthermore, the ability to switch between the seven historical periods offers a comparative study of their evolution in time. Conceptualization and abstraction of information through varied levels of detail allows the application to be available to anyone on the web, being computationally light and easy to use.

Growing trade volumes and increased security, health and financial control regulations require customs administrations to change their working practices worldwide. An existing dilemma however, is that governments would like on the one hand to reduce the administrative burden for businesses and on the other hand to increase security and control. The traditional single side power-posing by customs administrations to trade parties is not appropriate any more. The European Union is now realizing the potential benefits of establishing Customs-and-Business partnerships. To achieve such collaboration, current customs procedures need to be redesigned, and ICT is a key enabler for the redesign. In this paper we present a model-based approach using two levels of abstraction – value and process levels – to support domain experts in investigating how customs procedures can be redesigned while coping with business and administrative challenges. Especially, we focus on a methodological applicatio...

The ADO.NET Entity Framework provides a persistence layer for .NET applications that allows developers to work at a higher level of abstraction when interacting with data and data-access interfaces. Developers can model and access their data using a conceptual schema that is mapped to a relational database via a flexible mapping. Interaction with the data can take place using a SQLbased data manipulation language and iterator APIs, or through an object-based domain model in the spirit of object-to-relational mappers.

Enterprise Architecture (EA) description frameworks embody a "worldview" which is used by architects to conceptualize the enterprise and its elements. This "worldview" manifests itself in the choice of language constructs and in modeling rules and guidelines, and, whether explicitly or not, reflects some foundational ontological choices. This paper reflects on the practical consequences of some of these choices. We focus on the capability-related elements in EA defense frameworks (DoDAF, MODAF and NAF). In particular, we analyse the support for modeling capabilities in these frameworks from the prism of a fundamental distinction in formal ontology: two-category vs. four-category ontology. By analyzing the current choices in these frameworks and identifying some adverse consequences, we are able to suggest well-founded recommendations for improvements.

The present study aimed to develop a literature-based and expert-modified model for credibility evaluation of scientific web information
in order to be used for academic purposes by utilizing a mixed heuristic method. First, meta-synthesis was applied to design a conceptual
model. In terms of its usability, the model was evaluated by a sample of student users in five top universities of Iran. The data were
analyzed by SPSS 20.0 and LISREL 8.7 for Structural Equation Modelling. Based on the seven-stage meta-synthesis, a conceptual model,
including 68 indicators, 14 components, and two main dimensions was identified. The model was confirmed by the sample experts by
considering the high degree of Kendall’s coefficient of concordance and the agreement percentage of most dimensions of the model
which were 0.67 and higher than 90%, respectively. Next, the results of confirmatory factor analysis were analyzed according to the
structural model and indices related to the goodness of fit in order to ensure a high quality respecting measuring the identified variables.
Based on data analysis, the variables were of high quality in the studied context although there were some differences among the
dimensions. The results further revealed that credibility evaluation is a concept with different and multiple dimensions and components
suitable for users, designers, and policymakers which should be considered in designing and evaluating web resources.

For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the ontological foundations of Conceptual Modeling by participating to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and the UFO-based modeling language OntoUML, which have been successfully employed in a number of different sectors. The empirical feedback from these experiences led us to reconsider UFO's theory of relations, proposing a new theory that has already been applied to model subtle notions in the business domain, such as value, risk, service, and contract. In this paper, we advance a first formal characterization of this new theory, which is then used to design a new metamodel for OntoUML.

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.

In philosophy, the term ontology has been used since the 17 century to refer both to a
philosophical discipline (Ontology with a capital “O”), and as a domain-independent system of categories that can be used in the conceptualization of domain-specific scientific theories. In the past decades there has been a growing interest in the subject of ontology in computer and information sciences. In the last few years, this interest has expanded considerably in the context of the Semantic Web and MDA (Model-Driven Architecture) research efforts, and due to the role ontologies are perceived to play in these initiatives. In this paper, we explore the relations between Ontology and ontologies in the philosophical sense with domain ontologies in computer science. Moreover, we elaborate on formal characterizations for the notions of ontology, conceptualization and metamodel, as well as on the relations between these notions. Additionally, we discuss a set of criteria that a modeling language should meet in order to be considered a suitable language to model phenomena in a given domain, and present a systematic framework for language evaluation and design. Furthermore, we argue for the importance of ontology in both philosophical senses aforementioned for designing and evaluating a suitable general ontology representation language, and we address the question whether the so-called Ontology Web languages can be considered as suitable general ontology representation languages. Finally, we motivate the need for two complementary classes of modeling languages in Ontology Engineering addressing two separate sets of concerns.

Prevention is a pervasive phenomenon. It is about blocking an effect before it happens or stopping it as it unfolds: vaccines prevent (the unfolding of) diseases; seat belts prevent events causing serious injuries; circuit breaks prevent the manifestation of overcurrents. Many disciplines in the information sciences deal with modeling and reasoning about prevention. Examples include risk and security management as well as medical and legal informatics. Having a proper conceptualization of this phenomenon is crucial for devising proper modeling mechanisms and tools to support these disciplines. Forming such a conceptualization is a matter of Formal Ontology. In fact, prevention and related notions have become a topic of interest in this area. In this paper, with the support of Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO), we conduct an ontological analysis of this and other related notions, namely, the notions of countermeasures and countermeasure mechanisms, including the notion of antidotes. As a result of this conceptual clarification process, we propose an ontology-based reusable module extending UFO and capturing the relations between these elements. Finally, we employ this module to address a few cases in risk management.

This paper addresses the complexity of conceptual modeling in a sce-nario in which semantic interoperability requirements are increasingly present. It elaborates on the need for developing sound ontological foundations for conceptual modeling but also for developing complexity management tools derived from these foundations. In particular, the paper discusses three of these tools, namely, ontological patterns, ontological anti-patterns and pattern languages

1. Introductory remarks Modeling is one of the basic methods in empirical sciences. Generally speaking, it consists of the gradual construction of a cognitively useful – though simplified and idealized – image of described phenomena. As this image often takes the form of an abstract formal description – for example, a system of equations, or a set of logical formulas – modeling relies significantly on formal sciences such as mathematics, logic, or computer science. 1 The following can be pointed to as typical examples of models con-structed in empirical sciences: a) in physics – models of the atom, for example, the Bohr atomic model; b) in neurobiology – models of the neu-ron, for example, the McCulloch-Pitts linear neural model [McCulloch, Pitts 1943]; c) in psychology – computerized models of semantic memory, for example, Quillian's network model [Quillian 1968]; d) in cognitive science – partial 2 models of mind, including a rich collection of rule-based reasoning models (imp...

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.

Data warehouse modeling is a complex task, which involves knowledge of business processes of the domain of discourse, understanding the structural and behavioral system's conceptual model, and familiarity with data warehouse technologies. The suitability of current data warehouse modeling methods for large-scale systems is questionable, as they require multiple manual actions to discover measures and relevant dimensional entities and they tend to disregard the system's dynamic aspects. We present an Object-process-based Data Warehouse Construction (ODWC) method that overcomes these limitations of existing methods by utilizing the operational system conceptual model to construct a corresponding data warehouse schema. We specify the ODWC method, apply it on a case study, evaluate it, and compare it to existing methods.

Process models are usually depicted as directed graphs, with nodes representing activities and directed edges control flow. While struc-tured processes with pre-defined control flow have been studied in detail , flexible processes including ad-hoc activities need further investigation. This paper presents flexible process graph, a novel approach to model processes in the context of dynamic environment and adaptive process participants' behavior. The approach allows defining execution constraints, which are more restrictive than traditional ad-hoc processes and less restrictive than traditional control flow, thereby balancing struc-tured control flow with unstructured ad-hoc activities. Flexible process graph focuses on what can be done to perform a process. Process par-ticipants' routing decisions are based on the current process state. As a formal grounding, the approach uses hypergraphs, where each edge can associate any number of nodes. Hypergraphs are used to define execution semantics of processes formally. We provide a process scenario to motivate and illustrate the approach.