No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
An ontological analysis of the notion of community in the RM-ODP enterprise language
Abstract
In our past work, we have shown that a number of theories from conceptual modeling and ontological analysis can be used to clarify the definitions of role-related and goal-related concepts in the RM-ODP [1,2]. This paper builds up on our earlier efforts by providing an ontology-based account for the notion of communities in the reference model's Enterprise Language [38]. We address issues regarding the composition of communities, the filling of roles in communities, the decomposition of a community's objective into sub-objectives (delegated to community members). The use of an ontology that deals with aspects of social reality and intentionality [30] plays an important role in this account, revealing the intentionality of communities and enterprise objects; the social relations between communities and enterprise objects in the community; the social relations between objects in the community; the social relations between communities; the normative character of a community's contract, etc. The analysis allows us to propose well-founded recommendations for clarifications and identify potential amendments to the standard as well as issues for further investigation.
... Our Core Ontology for Financial Reporting Information Systems (COFRIS) is grounded on Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. In this paper, we build on our previous works on Economic Exchange regarded from Enterprise-Specific perspective [5] and early versions of COFRIS for shared ledger [6,7]. ...
... According to UFO-C, the Sub-ontology of Intentional and Social Entities [23], the exchange of Communicative acts creates Social moments such as Commitments and Claims that inhere in the Social agents involved in these communicative acts. Social agents are Parties' Roles played by Human agents and Institutional agents. ...
... Two or more pairs of mutually dependent Commitments and Claims form a kind of social relationship between the social individuals involved and is termed a Social relator [23]. Social relators are important for our consideration because they are grounding Legal relators that in turn are grounding Economic relators. ...
Enterprises operate in markets by building and fulfilling exchange relationships. However, up to date accounting information systems are organized in an enterprise-specific way. We introduce the Market Information perspective on top of the Exchange (Shared Ledger) and Enterprise-Specific perspectives. The latter, developed earlier, are enhanced and the interplay with the Market perspective elaborated. First, we analyze how are Market related concepts of Offering, Contract, Resource, and Social Interaction represented in UFO ontologies and other ontologies. Second, we propose a Market perspective, and included Exchange, and Enterprise perspective conceptual model of a Shared Information System for Financial Reporting in OntoUML language, and third, we analyze the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) Conceptual Framework and Standards for Financial Reporting to uncover construct deficit and overload in these Standards and Framework for usage in Shared Information Systems.
... It is relevant for the IS field because (a) the AIS is traditionally at the core of enterprise IS (b) blockchain/SL is expected to be a crucial component of the future IS technology. Moreover, the value of ontological modeling in the IS field has been widely recognized, as witnessed for instance by the Formal Ontologies in IS (FOIS) conference series that had its 10th edition in 2018, and the development and use of languages like OntoUML [15]. The results of the paper should also be of interest to accounting researchers. ...
... According to UFO-C, the Sub-ontology of Intentional and Social Entities [15], the exchange of Communicative acts creates Social moments such as Commitments and Claims that inhere in the Social agents involved in these communicative acts. Social agents are roles played by Human agents and Institutional agents (such as Enterprises). ...
... Economic exchange events are performed by Market participants. Following [12,15] we define Market participant (or economic agent) as a UFO mixin played by social agents -persons and policy regulated enterprises, contractual groups of people and enterprises, rule regulated market, or the society at large, regulated by law. Market participants are capable of self and social committing and fulfilling economic actions, compliant with the market regulations. ...
Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) suggests a new way to implement Accounting Information Systems, but an ontologically sound consensus-based design is missing to date. Against this research gap, the paper introduces a DLT-based shared ledger solution in a formal way and compliant with Financial Reporting Standards. We build on the COFRIS accounting ontology (grounded on UFO) and the blockchain ontology developed by De Kruijff & Weigand that distinguishes between a Datalogical level, an Infological and an Essential (conceptual) level. It is shown how both consensual and enterprise-specific parts of the business exchange transaction can be represented in a concise way, and how this pattern can be implemented using Smart Contracts. It is argued that the proposed Shared Ledger Accounting system increases the quality of the contents from an accounting perspective as well as the quality of the system in terms of auditability and interoperability.
... This often results in representational gaps and ontological deficiencies, which have been scrutinized for over two decades now under the banner of "ontological analysis" [27], [36] (or "representational analysis" [37]). Several studies have shown issues in the representational capabilities of EA frameworks and conceptual modeling languages (e.g., [1], [3], [28], [37]), employing reference ontologies in this task. A reference ontology serves in this case as an "analysis theory" [9] or "representation theory" [37] and is contrasted with the language's underlying "worldview". ...
... Given a situation in which m is in the presence of a particular ferrous object (at a certain distance, of a certain mass, in a surface with a certain friction, etc.), the dispositions of these two entities (ferrous object, magnet) can be manifested through the occurrence of an event, namely, the movement of that object towards the magnet. In the case of capabilities of persons and organizations, the events which are the manifestations of capabilities are (complex) actions [1]. ...
... This leads to the modeling challenges that we have previously discussed, i.e., the proliferation of a multitude of (possibly infinite) universals. 1. We should clarify that ArchiMate lacks in general a clear distinction between universals and individuals, and, hence, one could use the capability construct to represent either a capability type or a capability (individual). ...
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.
... In order to show the usefulness of our approach, we used the proposed language constructs to model a real strategic plan from a Brazilian mid-to-large pension fund. In order to clarify the semantics of the proposed constructs, we use notions of the UFO foundational ontology [12] [13] and Bratman's planning theory [14] in the definition of a conceptual model for strategic planning. ...
... Given the focus of this paper, we discuss the part of UFO's taxonomy of individuals that is relevant for this paper. For a full discussion regarding this ontological foundation, including the taxonomy of types ("universals") we refer to [12], [13] and [15]. This section is based on the discussions presented in [16] and [17]. ...
... Events that an agent performs motivated by its drive to satisfy its goals are called actions. Only agents are said to perform actions [13], as opposed to non-agentive objects, which participate (non-intentionally) in events. Agents can be further specialized into physical agents (e.g., a person) and social agents (e.g., an organization). ...
... See [6] and [16] for thorough presentations.) Our choice for UFO is based on the key role it has played in previous efforts in domain ontology engineering [16], harmonization of semantic models [17][18] and evaluation and revision of enterprise languages [3] [19]. By specializing UFO, O3 provides an ontologically well-grounded view that covers the basic notions of the organizational domain. ...
... An organization may be structured into other social agents that together contribute to the operation or behavior of the whole, defining thus what is called a functional complex in [6]. (See [19] for a discussion on the whole-part relation of UFO applied at the organizational context.) ...
... The use of reference ontologies for evaluating and revising enterprise modeling languages have been shown to be promising, as observed in [4] [5][3] [19]. The efforts most closely related to this work include: a semantic analysis of another fragment of ArchiMate (more specifically the motivational layer [4]); a semantic analysis of the notion of role in ArchiMate and other EA description techniques [5]; and an analysis and revision of the ARIS capabilities for organizational structure modeling [3]. ...
Enterprise Architecture (EA) promotes the establishment of a holistic view of the structure and way of working of an organization. One of the aspects covered in EA is associated with the organization's "active structure", which concerns "who" undertakes organizational activities. Several approaches have been proposed in order to provide a means for representing enterprise architectures, among which the ArchiMate, an EA modeling language. In this paper, we present a semantic analysis of the fragment of the ArchiMate metamodel related with the representation of active structure. In addition, we present a proposal to extend the metamodel based on a well-founded ontology for the organizational domain. Our objective is to enrich the language with important capabilities to represent organizational structures using a principled ontology-based approach.
... See [6] and [16] for thorough presentations.) Our choice for UFO is based on the key role it has played in previous efforts in domain ontology engineering [16], harmonization of semantic models [17][18] and evaluation and revision of enterprise languages [3] [19]. By specializing UFO, O3 provides an ontologically well-grounded view that covers the basic notions of the organizational domain. ...
... An organization may be structured into other social agents that together contribute to the operation or behavior of the whole, defining thus what is called a functional complex in [6]. (See [19] for a discussion on the whole-part relation of UFO applied at the organizational context.) ...
... The use of reference ontologies for evaluating and revising enterprise modeling languages have been shown to be promising, as observed in [4] [5][3] [19]. The efforts most closely related to this work include: a semantic analysis of another fragment of ArchiMate (more specifically the motivational layer [4]); a semantic analysis of the notion of role in ArchiMate and other EA description techniques [5]; and an analysis and revision of the ARIS capabilities for organizational structure modeling [3]. ...
Enterprise Architecture (EA) promotes the establishment of a holistic view of the structure and way of working of an organization. One of the aspects covered in EA is associated with the organization's "active structure", which concerns "who" undertakes organizational activities. Several approaches have been proposed in order to provide a means for representing enterprise architectures, among which the ArchiMate, an EA modeling language. In this paper, we present a semantic analysis of the fragment of the ArchiMate metamodel related with the representation of active structure. In addition, we present a proposal to extend the metamodel based on a well-founded ontology for the organizational domain. Our objective is to enrich the language with important capabilities to represent organizational structures using a principled ontology-based approach.
... See [6] and [16] for thorough presentations.) Our choice for UFO is based on the key role it has played in previous efforts in domain ontology engineering [16], harmonization of semantic models [17][18] and evaluation and revision of enterprise languages [3] [19]. By specializing UFO, O3 provides an ontologically well-grounded view that covers the basic notions of the organizational domain. ...
... An organization may be structured into other social agents that together contribute to the operation or behavior of the whole, defining thus what is called a functional complex in [6]. (See [19] for a discussion on the whole-part relation of UFO applied at the organizational context.) ...
... The use of reference ontologies for evaluating and revising enterprise modeling languages have been shown to be promising, as observed in [4] [5][3] [19]. The efforts most closely related to this work include: a semantic analysis of another fragment of ArchiMate (more specifically the motivational layer [4]); a semantic analysis of the notion of role in ArchiMate and other EA description techniques [5]; and an analysis and revision of the ARIS capabilities for organizational structure modeling [3]. ...
Enterprise Architecture (EA) promotes the establishment of a holistic view of the structure and way of working of an organization. One of the aspects covered in EA is associated with the organization's "active structure", which concerns "who" undertakes organizational activities. Several approaches have been proposed in order to provide a means for representing enterprise architectures, among which the ArchiMate, an EA modeling language. In this paper, we present a semantic analysis of the fragment of the ArchiMate metamodel related with the representation of active structure. In addition, we present a proposal to extend the metamodel based on a well-founded ontology for the organizational domain. Our objective is to enrich the language with important capabilities to represent organizational structures using a principled ontology-based approach.
... agriculture [129,130] accounting [27,49,54,116] business processes [83,94,153,164] biodiversity [5] bioinformatics [59,140] branding [44] communities [6] capabilities [15] competition [149] data processing [126] decision making [98,138] design science research [177] digital platforms [38] discrete event simulation [82,84,85,86] economic exchanges [135] emergency and disaster management [48,111,125] engineering [133] e-government [19,39,115,132] game theory [13] gaming [56,114] goals and motivation [14,99,100] geology [1,141,169] legal issues [42,43,60,120,151] money [12] mulsemedia [144] organizational structures [152] programming languages [2] security and safety [37,47,113,148,179] services [127] simulation for land covering and use [62] smart contracts [155] software engineering [40,104,105,112,119,124,143,156,162,173] software requirements [25,40,41,102,117,128] telecommunication networks [17,139] treatment [109] tourism [9] trust [10] value [57,66,146] waste management [3] Moreover, UFO and ontologies built with it have been used to analyze, reengineer, or integrate many modeling languages and standards in different domains: ...
... -ArchiMate [7,11,14,15,61,147,150] -ARIS [153,154] -DEMO [134] -ISO/IEC 24744 [142] -ITU-T G.805 [18] -BPMN [83] -RM-ODP [6] -TOGAF [7] -Tropos and i * [100,101,55] -UML [34,70] A recent study shows that UFO is the second-most used foundational ontology in conceptual modeling and the one with the fastest adoption rate [165]. That study also shows that OntoUML is among the most used languages in ontology-driven conceptual modeling (together with UML, (E)ER, OWL, and BPMN). ...
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.)
... In the next subsection it is presented a brief of UFO-C and UFO-L. For more details of these UFO layers, we recommend the following works: [5], [6], and [14]. ...
... UFO-C [14] is an ontology of social aspects built on UFO-A and UFO-B. One of the theories used to base UFO-C was Searle's theory of intentionality, which is applied in the construction of the social ontology [15]. ...
Abstract
In the last years, the society has been changing in its way to face the idea of human failure, proposing new approaches to minimize it. Thus, a retributive culture is being replaced to a restorative culture taking into account a paradigm of measuring and vindicating human failures in organizations. In this paper we present the first steps of the ontology of healthcare compliance based on Just Culture theory as well as on the relation-based ontological theories. The method applied to develop the ontology is SABiO, which permits to develop the artifact in cycles. In order to maintain consistency and coherence in the modeling of this domain, we ground the ontology on a foundational ontology called Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) as well as on a legal core ontology called UFO-L. The results of the first cycle presented in this paper are: 1) the ontology-based conceptual modeling, 2) the nonfunctional requisites; and 3) the competency questions (QCs). In order to verify the ontology built, we have instantiated a small real case.
Keywords
compliance, just culture, ontology, UFO, UFO-L, healthcare
... Here we describe a fragment of UFO that is relevant to the scope of this paper. Further details can be found in [Guizzardi, 2005], [Guizzardi et al. 2008], [Almeida and Guizzardi 2013], , [Guizzardi and Wagner 2013], [Carvalho et al. 2015]. ...
... Problems regarding the ARIS Method were exposed and possible solutions to these problems were proposed. [Almeida and Guizzardi 2013] discuss the RM-ODP enterprise language, performing an ontological analysis to clarify the definitions of rolerelated and goal-related concepts. The analysis has supported the authors in identifying certain ambiguities of the RM-ODP specification and allowed them to propose wellfounded recommendations for clarifications and identify potential amendments to the standard. ...
This paper presents an analysis of capability-related concepts in three enterprise architecture (EA) frameworks for the defense domain (DoDAF, MODAF and NAF). In this analysis, we adopt an ontological account for capabilities based on the notion of dispositions as endurants; a key aspect of this account is that it includes both disposition universals and individuals, in line with Aristotle's four-category ontology. We show how these foundations-which differ from the perdurantist foundations underlying the three defense frameworks-can serve to clarify semantic issues in the frameworks' support for capabilities.
... To support the construction of ontologic multi-level conceptual models, we employ UFO [12] and MLT [16]. The Unified Foun (UFO) is a domain independent system of ca ing results from disciplines such as Analy Cognitive Science, Philosophical Logics and the years, UFO has been successfully emplo classical conceptual modeling constructs Types and Taxonomic Structures, Part-W Intrinsic and Relational Properties, Weak E and Datatypes [12], and also organizational s of enterprise modeling approaches [1], [20]. ...
... Examples of formal organization include "Microsoft Inc.", "The UK Government" and the "Federal University of Espírito Santo". Formal organizations may be composed of other formal organizations and of organizational units (see [20] for a discussion on the whole-part relation of UFO applied at the organizational context.). ...
Conceptualizing the organizational structure domain requires considering multiple levels of classification, with both types and types of types included in the domain of enquiry (e.g., types of organizational units and particular organizational units). In this paper we propose a semantic foundation for the organizational structure domain that is capable to address the multi-level modeling issues. We present a core organizational structure ontology built with the combination of a foundational ontology (UFO) and a multi-level modeling theory (MLT). This ontology serves to provide semantic foundations for enterprise modeling languages but also as a basis for the development of enterprise-specific ontologies. We discuss our contributions with respect to existing multi-level modeling approaches and with respect to a number of prominent enterprise modeling frameworks , languages and enterprise ontologies.
... Differently from UFO-S, however, it does not distinguish explicitly service offerings and service agreements. The proposal is grounded on concepts for RM-ODP (such as that of community) which have been analyzed successfully with UFO in the past [44]. A similar effort for the Healthcare SOA Ontology is planned using UFO-S as a reference ontology, which should provide a sound foundation for this standard . ...
... [41][42][43][44] ...
... Agents can bring about actions (intentional events). According to Almeida and Guizzardi [48], they are substantials capable of bearing special kinds of moments named intentional moments. Agents may play social roles, such as husband and wife in the context of a marriage (a social relator), as well as, student and professor in the context of an enrollment (a social relator). ...
... Since this research work is guide by the relationship perspective, this legal concept is the main concept represented in our model, using the notion of legal relator. According to Almeida and Guizzardi [48], a social relator (figure 2) is a relator "composed of two or more pairs of associated social moments (social commitments; social claims)". In turn, a legal relator is a specialization of social relator, dependent on a number of other individuals or universals that play legal roles (which are universals that agents instantiate contingently when bound by the legal relator). ...
Ontologies have been used in recent decades as a conceptual modeling tool in different areas of knowledge. In Law, legal core ontologies (LCO) are proposed as a means of computational representation of essential concepts in order to construct legal domain ontologies and applications for the legal world. A relevant source of legal concepts is the legal theory. However, there are divergences between legal theories about what is law. This divergence should be taken account by ontologists because of their consequences to the usefulness of the concepts. In the last decades, legal theories have proposed solutions for modern social claims. These legal theories have the potential of producing a LCO that is more suitable for the current society. An example of these theories is Alexy's Theory of Fundamental Rights. In this paper, we explore an initial ontological model for rights based on Alexy's Theory of Fundamental Rights in order to build a consistent LCO grounded in Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). We aim to build up this LCO such that it can become a basis for building domain ontologies, languages, knowledge bases, and applications of the legal world.
... Differently from UFO-S, however, it does not distinguish explicitly service offerings and service agreements. The proposal is grounded on concepts for RM-ODP (such as that of community) which have been analyzed successfully with UFO in the past [44]. A similar effort for the Healthcare SOA Ontology is planned using UFO-S as a reference ontology, which should provide a sound foundation for this standard . ...
... [41][42][43][44] ...
The concept of “service” has been characterized in different disciplines and by different authors from various points of view. This variety of characterizations has emerged because although this notion seems intuitive, it is far from trivial, with many interrelated perspectives. Given their importance in enterprise computing and Service Science in general, we believe that a clear account of services and service-related concepts is necessary and would serve as a basis for communication, consensus and alignment among approaches and perspectives. In this paper we propose a commitment-based account of the notion of service captured in a core reference ontology called UFO-S. We address the commitments established between service providers and customers, and show how such commitments affect the service lifecycle. Moreover, we show that the commitment-based account can serve to harmonize different notions of service in the literature.
... This paper proposes an approach based on ontologies as a means to specify knowledge and reason about it. Ontologies and associated techniques are increasingly being recognized as valuable tools in the EA domain, as witnessed in [11], [12], [13], [14]. In fact, there is a wide body of knowledge from which EA practice can benefit, including ontology matching [15], which can improve model creation, extension and validation [16]. ...
... The use of ontologies and associated techniques in EA is increasing, with proposals of EA based on ontologies for improving the models and their semantics [11], [12], [13], [14]. In fact, ontologies bring the following benefits to the table [22]: ...
Enterprise architecture aligns business and information technology through the management of different elements and domains. An architecture description encompasses a wide and heterogeneous spectrum of areas, such as business processes, metrics, application components, people and technological infrastructure. Views express the elements and relationships of one or more domains from the perspective of specific system concerns relevant to one or more of its stakeholders. As a result, each view needs to be expressed in the description language that best suits its concerns. However, enterprise architecture languages tend to advocate a rigid "one-model fits all" approach where an all-encompassing description language describes several architectural domains. This approach hinders extensibility and adds complexity to the overall description language. On the other hand, integrating multiple models raises several challenges at the level of model coherence, consistency and trace ability. Moreover, EA models should be computable so that the effort involved in their analysis is manageable. This work advocates the employment of ontologies and associated techniques in EA for contributing to the solving of the aforementioned issues. Thus, a proposal is made comprising an extensible architecture that consists of a core domain-independent ontology that can be extended through the integration of domain-specific ontologies focusing on specific concerns. The proposal is demonstrated through a real-world evaluation scenario involving the analysis of the models according to the requirements of the scenario stakeholders.
... If we examine the operation of enterprise communities from the perspective of merger behavior, the predator-prey relationship in ecosystems is a good analogy [3]. There are abundant food chains and food relationship networks in ecosystems, where various types of predators and prey not only maintain their own survival but also maintain a relatively stable operation of the ecosystem through predation relationships [4]. Therefore, if the predator-prey relationship in the ecosystem can be mapped to the merger behavior in the enterprise community, it can open up a new research perspective for the dynamic mechanism of technological innovation diffusion on the enterprise community. ...
In order to study the dynamic mechanism of the impact of technological innovation diffusion on enterprise population networks, a corresponding relationship between enterprise population networks and predatory models was established based on a predatory model. Without considering the impact of technological innovation diffusion, the stability of the enterprise population network was analyzed, and the results showed that it has the characteristic of local asymptotic stability at a positive equilibrium point. Considering the influence of technological innovation diffusion, the stability of the enterprise population network becomes complex, and its stability at the positive equilibrium point is also affected by the eigenvalue of the Laplacian matrix and technological innovation diffusion coefficient. The simulation experimental results indicate that in addition to the influence of technological innovation diffusion coefficient, the connection probability density of enterprise population networks has an important impact on stability. Only when the connection probability density is very small can the enterprise population network resist the impact of technological innovation diffusion and maintain stability.
... Therefore, it is necessary to provide an ontological analysis of this domain ontology by using some foundational ontology as grounding. We chose UFO for this purpose because it successfully supports studies for ontological analysis, such as [2,15,21]. Besides, UFO grounds the COoVR (one of the ontologies used in this case of study). Figure 10 shows the Ontology of ISO/IEC 27005 and its ontological analysis in light of UFO and presented as an 39 The stereotype for UFO intrinsic moments for the OntoUML [34] language. ...
Organizations are actively seeking efficient solutions for the management and protection of their assets. However, Cybersecurity is a vast and complex domain, especially for large enterprises because it requires an interdisciplinary approach. Knowledge Graphs are one of the mechanisms that organizations use to explore security among assets and possible attacks. The grounding of concepts is fundamental to implementing Knowledge Graphs, and it is one of the most relevant ontology applications. Therefore, Cybersecurity Ontologies have emerged as an important research subject. The first contribution of this paper is a search for previously existing works that have defined Cybersecurity Ontologies. We found twenty-eight ontologies in this search. Based on this result, we propose a Cybersecurity Terminological Validation and a Framework for Classifying Ontologies. Then, we provide a cross-analysis of these two proposals and present a proposal of best practices for improving the ontological approach in the cybersecurity domain. We also discuss the impact of this proposal with regard to the Ontology Engineering process. Our goal is to provide a solution that meets the organization’s needs in terms of Cybersecurity and to contribute to Ontology Engineering research.
... Furthermore, a study published in 2016 [23], reveals that it is the second most used foundational ontology in conceptual modeling and the one with the fastest adoption rate. Over the years it has been used to provide conceptual clarification in complex enterprise domains such as Capabilities [24], Organizational Structures [25], Communities [26], Goals and Motivations [27] [28], Legal Relations [12], Business Processes [29], Discrete Event Simulation [30], Value [31] [32], Risk [33], etc. Of particular interest to the purposes of this article, UFO has been used to develop core ontologies in the domain of Services (termed UFO-S) [2], and Legal Relations (UFO-L) [11] [12]. ...
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 and in legislation 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 and bridge 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.
... By using as a reference ontology the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) [18], ontological analysis has been successfully employed over the years to analyze, (re)design and integrate conceptual modeling languages and standards in different domains (e.g., RM-ODP [19], TROPOS/i* [20], ARIS [21], BPMN [22], and ArchiMate [23]). Of particular interest of this paper, UFO has been used to develop core ontologies in the domain of Services (termed UFO-S). ...
This paper presents a diagnosis of mainstream service modeling languages (SoaML, USDL, and ArchiMate) in light of UFO-S, a reference ontology for services. UFO-S is intended as a broad ontology for service phenomena, harmonizing different perspectives on services (e.g., "service as commitment", and "service as capability"), and addressing several phases of the service lifecycle (service offering, service agreement, and service delivery). As result, UFO-S is used as an "analysis theory" to identify choices in these languages concerning their focus and coverage of service phenomena. We identify a number of possible improvements concerning the representation of service participant (roles), the description of service offerings, service agreements and service delivery.
... El estudio de las nociones como entidades teóricas puede parecer trivial, pero como señalan algunos autores son verdaderas en psicología (Machery, 2007), y muchas otras ciencias tales como la economía (Louçã, 2014), el desarrollo empresarial (Almeida y Guizzardi, 2013), la inteligencia artificial (Lucas, 1998, Freund, 2009, la política pública (Lo y Ville, 2008, Moore et al. 2013, He y Sikor, 2015 y la lingüística (Lingua, 2010) por mencionar solo algunas. Por lo anterior, se considera que el lenguaje es importante en todas las disciplinas, pues de acuerdo a Halliday (1994( , citado por Aman, 2012 es un medio para que las personas modelen y representan su mundo, es decir, la manera en la que pronunciamos el mundo refleja la noción que tenemos de él. ...
According to constructivism, notions are the bases for knowledge building. In this paper, notions are considered as imaginary constructs which are expressed in pre-conceptual and symbolic language. From this conceptual frame, the notions related to innovation and engineering were studied in two Mexican Schools of Engineering through an ethnographic method, by using a double enter matrix. Few differences among genders and academic programs were observed, so as between the two participant schools in this study. Novelty is the most common notion related to innovation. Engineering was perceived by students as strongly related to application and practice. The school has a deep role in conceptional change but the role of schooling in some links between notions is questionable. An opportunity window is open to improve the role of formal education in training engineer mind.
... Since there are existential dependencies for the Relator theory concept, the modeler analyzes the Lawsuit modeling element to determine if the Relator existential dependency that refers to the Externally Dependent Moment concept is represented in the SIAPRO schema. A Relator is the sum of all individuals composed of all externally dependent moments that inhere in the same individual [1]. Externally Dependent Moments are Intrinsic Moments that inhere in a single individual, but are existentially dependent on a plurality of other individuals (Substantials). ...
Usually, data schemas are the only documentation available for legacy data. Information Technology (IT) artifacts, such as conceptual schemas, if existent, are often outdated. This leads to inconsistencies and ambiguities, as well as difficulties in reusing data. This work proposes an approach for reviewing data schemas based on ontological analysis, which considers each concept according to its nature, capturing more precisely its essence and generally improving semantic richness and precision. The idea is to provide a systematic procedure to annotate legacy data, starting with its conceptual schema, and thus to contribute to generate more consistent conceptual modeling artifacts. In order to illustrate the proposed procedure, the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) is used as a theoretical reference for annotating a real data schema in the Legal domain.
... Different authors have proposed methodologies and frameworks to achieve this (Evermann and Wand 2005;Harzallah et al. 2012;Guizzardi 2013). The purpose of these methodologies and frameworks is (1) to provide a rigorous definition of the construct of a modeling languages in terms of real-world semantics, (2) to identify inappropriately defined constructs, and (3) to recommend language improvements which reduce a lack of expressivity, ambiguity, and vagueness (Almeida and Guizzardi 2013). In CMOE?, the goal is not to improve the language itself, but to relate the constructs of the conceptual modeling language to the core ontology selected in the ontology setup phase. ...
Within an enterprise, various stakeholders create different conceptual models, such as process, data, and requirements models. These models are fundamentally based on similar underlying enterprise (domain) concepts, but they differ in focus, use different modeling languages, take different viewpoints, utilize different terminology, and are used to develop different enterprise artifacts; as such, they typically lack consistency and interoperability. This issue can be solved by enterprise-specific ontologies, which serve as a reference during the conceptual model creation. Using such a shared semantic repository makes conceptual models interoperable and facilitates model integration. The challenge to accomplish this is twofold: on the one hand, an up-to-date enterprise-specific ontology needs to be created and maintained, and on the other hand, different modelers also need to be supported in their use of the enterprise-specific ontology. The authors propose to tackle these challenges by means of a recommendation-based conceptual modeling and an ontology evolution framework, and we focus in particular on ontology-based modeling support. To this end, the authors present a framework for Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) as a conceptual modeling language, and focus on how modelers can be assisted during the modeling process and how this impacts the semantic quality of the resulting models. Subsequently, a first, large-scale explorative experiment is presented involving 140 business students to evaluate the BPMN instantiation of our framework. The experiments show promising results with regard to incurred overheads, intention of use and model interoperability.
... The importance of this technology is evidenced by the growing use of ontologies in a variety of application areas [21,22] and, especially, by their role on the Semantic Web initiative [23,24]. Ontology technologies are also used in the field of enterprise architecture to formalize organizational artefacts and to assist with model analysis [25,26,27,28,29,30]. In fact, there is a wide body of knowledge that may improve the practice of EA, including ontology matching [31], and model extension and validation [32]. ...
A goal of enterprise architecture is to align the business with the underlying support systems. An enterprise architecture description encompasses an heterogeneous spectrum of domains, such as business processes, application components, metrics, people and technological infrastructure. Architectural views express the domain elements and their relationships from the perspective of the system stakeholders. As a result, a view needs to be expressed using a domain language that addresses the specific concerns of its stakeholders. However, enterprise architecture description languages are often based on generic or broad meta-models that cross-cut distinct architectural domains. But describing each domain through a specialized language and then integrating it with the other domains raises challenges at the level of traceability and consistency. This paper proposes using ontologies to specify different enterprise architecture domains and to integrate and analyse these models. This goal is realized through a domain-independent language that is extended by domain-specific languages, each focussing on a set of specific domain concerns. The approach contributes to the alignment of the different domains while ensuring traceability between then concepts. The proposal is demonstrated through an evaluation scenario that uses ArchiMate as the domain-independent language extended with a set of domain-specific languages. The demonstration shows that the architecture domains can be integrated and analysed through the use of ontologies.
... enterprise or business languages, like the Reference Model of Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) [10], or the Enterprise Systems Interoperability (ESI) [11]; ...
Standards are documents that aim to define norms and common understanding of a subject by a group of people. In order to accomplish this purpose, these documents must define its terms and concepts in a clear and unambiguous way. Standards can be written in two different ways: by informal specification (e.g. natural language) or formal specification (e.g. math-based languages or diagrammatic ones). Remarkable papers have already shown how well-founded ontology languages provide resources for the specification’s author to better distinguish concepts and relations meanings, resulting in a better specification. This paper has the objective to expose the importance of truly ontological distinctions for standardizations. To achieve this objective, we evaluate a math-based formal specification, in Z notation, using a well-founded ontology language for a telecommunications case study, the ITU-T Recommendation G.805. The results confirm that truly ontological distinctions are essential for clear and unambiguous specifications.
... We intend to integrate these results with our results of [23] and [26], which addresses capabilities and some motivational concepts for EA. We also intend to interpret new proposed modeling concepts using the Unified Foundational Ontology [27] [28], in an effort to have coherent and aligned enterprise models. ...
Strategic planning improves both the financial and behavioral performance of an enterprise. It helps the enterprise set priorities, focus capabilities and resources, strengthen operations, ensure that stakeholders are working toward common goals and assess and adjust the enterprise's direction. Strategic planning is currently not explicitly represented in EA, although it motivates enterprise architecture choices. This paper studies strategic planning approaches and discusses their potential relation with EA. The paper focuses on how EA can contribute to strategic planning, discussing requirements on EA extensions to support strategic planning and pointing to solutions. A general approach to support strategic planning using EA should mutually benefit the practices of strategic planning and EA.
... For a number of years, we have been analyzing conceptual modeling languages (including enterprise modeling languages), standards, environments and domain ontologies, by employing the method described above and the foundational ontology UFO (Unified Foundational Ontology) as a reference model. The analyzed modeling languages include: UML [10,[16][17][18][19], Archimate [20], RM-ODP [21], TROPOS/i* and AORML [22,23], ARIS [24], and BPMN [25]. Despite the successful application of UFO in all these cases, it is important to highlight that the method discussed here could, in principle, be applied by taking different foundational ontologies as reference models. ...
In this chapter, we present a framework for the evaluation and (re)design of modeling languages. In our approach, this property can be systematically evaluated by comparing a concrete representation of the worldview underlying the language (captured in the language’s meta-model), with an explicit and formal representation of a conceptualization of that domain (a reference ontology). Moreover, we elaborate on formal characterizations for the notions of reference ontology, conceptualization and meta-model, as well as on the relations between them. By doing this, we can also formally define the relation between the state of affairs in reality deemed possible by an ontology and the grammatical models admitted by a modeling language. The precise characterization of this relation allows for a systematic improvement of a modeling language by incorporating ontological axioms as grammatical constraints in the language’s meta-model. Furthermore, we demonstrate how an approach based on visual simulation could be used to assess this relation, i.e., to evaluate the distance between the valid models of a language and the intended models according to the underlying conceptualization. Finally, we demonstrate how the use of a system of formal ontological properties can be systematically exploited in the design of pragmatically efficient domain-specific visual languages.
... For a more detailed discussion of the development and applications of UFO we refer to ( Guizzardi 2005), ( Guizzardi, Falbo, and Guizzardi 2008), (Almeida and Guizzardi 2013) and (). This section is based on the UFO description that appeared in (Azevedo et al. 2011). ...
The importance of capabilities and resources for portfolio management and business strategy has been recognized in the management literature. Despite that, little attention has been given to integrate the notions of capabilities and resources in enterprise architecture descriptions. One notable exception is a recent proposal to extend the ArchiMate framework and language to include capability and resources and thus improve ArchiMate’s coverage of portfolio management. This paper presents an ontological analysis of the concepts introduced in that proposal, focusing in particular on the resource, capability and competence concepts. We provide an account for these concepts in terms of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). The analysis allows us to identify semantic issues in the proposal and suggest well-founded recommendations for improvements. We revise the proposed metamodel in order to address the identified problems, thereby improving the semantic clarity and usefulness of the proposed language extension. Two real-world cases are modeled with the resulting metamodel to show the applicability of the constructs and relations in an industrial setting.
... Approaches that attempt to tackle this challenge include viewpoint orientation [10], situational engineering, as well as the integration and extension of metamodels [5,11]. Ontology-based techniques have also been proposed [16,2,1,9]. However, keeping such models coherent and checking their conformance is not straightforward [3]. ...
An enterprise architecture provides views on heterogeneous domains, such as business processes, people, business rules, application components, and technological infrastructure. These views are defined according to specific concerns and need to be expressed with an adequate description language. This entails integrating the description languages as a means to address the multiple concerns but raises the challenge of keeping the models coherent, consistent and traceable. This work describes an application of ontology engineering to enterprise architecture. The contribution is an extensible architecture description language that includes an upper ontology that can be integrated with multiple domain-specific ontologies, each focusing on different concerns. The resulting integrated models can be automatically analysed.
... The social layer of UFO includes important notions of social agents (e.g., enterprises), the objectives they pursue, the roles they play, the social relations they establish (commitments and corresponding claims), etc. The choice of using UFO for building UFO-S can be justified by successful application of UFO in previous works to evaluate, redesign, and ground ontologies, languages, and frameworks of several research areas, such as Software Engineering, Conceptual Modelling, and Enterprise Modelling (e.g., [1][2] [16] [36]). Further, UFO-S itself has been used to analyse the structuring principles of serviceoriented architectures [33] and the ArchiMate language concepts at the business layer [32]. ...
Responding to a wide range of interoperability requirements for eHealth, the HL7 standardization
organization has recently published an initial version of the SOA Healthcare Ontology (SHO). The purpose of this effort is to serve as a shared reference conceptual model, which can guide the definition of service-related aspects of future eHealth standards and solutions. In this paper, we analyse the SOA Healthcare Ontology using a well-founded ontological approach referred to as UFO-S. UFO-S is a reference ontology that characterizes the notion of service by applying the concepts of commitments and claims and harmonizing several views of services from a broad perspective. Our objective is to provide an ontological foundation to this new HL7 standardization effort. Given that UFO-S is formalized and defined according to a sound foundational ontology, we believe this paper can serve as a basis for further improvement in the formalization and revision of SHO and its conceptual representation.
... As a core ontology [10], UFO-S is grounded in a foundational ontology (the Unified Foundational Ontology -UFO [21][22] [23]), which offers a rich conceptualization about the notions of objects and agents, types, properties, relationships, events/processes, and social concepts (e.g., intention, commit ments, claims, delegation, and dependence). The foundation offered by UFO has been successfully applied in previous works to evaluate, redesign, and ground ontologies, languages, and frameworks of several research areas, such as Software Engineering, Conceptual Modeling, and Enterprise Modeling (e.g., [24][23] [25] [26]). ...
In this paper we analyze the structuring principles underlying Service-oriented Enterprise Architecture (S oEA) in the light of a core reference ontology for services (UFO-S ). The ontology provides a broad account for services and is centered on the service commitments/claims that are established by service participants throughout the service lifecycle. UFO-S is applied as theory to support the analysis of S oEA structuring techniques and thereby reveal social aspects inherent to service phenomena in SoEA (e.g., commitments/claims, and delegations) that remain underexplored due to the current prevailing capability-based S oEA view. From that, we advocate for a commitment-based S oEA view, which can be harmonized to the capability-based SoEA view in order to establish richer SoEA structuring principles. Implications of our analysis are discussed taking as basis widely adopted service-oriented approaches (SOA-RM by OAS IS , ITIL, and ArchiMate).
... The social layer of UFO includes important notions of social agents (e.g., enterprises), the objectives they pursue, the roles they play, the social relations they establish (commit ments and corresponding claims), etc. Our choice of using UFO for building UFO-S can be justified by successful application of UFO in previous works to evaluate, redesign, and ground ontologies, languages, and frameworks of several research areas, such as Software Engineering, Conceptual Modeling, and Enterprise Modeling (e.g., [11][9][12] [13]). ...
ArchiMate is a widely-adopted enterprise architecture language based on the “service orientation”
paradigm. Although its support for service orientation has had great impact in the representation of (service-oriented) enterprise architectures in the last 10 years, the representation of services in ArchiMate is not without problems. In particular, the predominance of the perspective of service as “unit of functionality” hides some important social aspects inherent to service relations and makes some of the models that the language produces ambiguous. In order to address some of these issues, in this paper we discuss an ontological analysis of service modeling fragments of ArchiMate’s Business layer. This analysis is based on UFO-S , a reference ontology that characterizes the notion of service by applying the concepts of commitments and claims and harmonizing several views of services from a broad perspective. We contribute to: (i) providing real-world semantics to service modeling fragments in ArchiMate based on the notion of service commitments/claims; and (ii) offering recommendations in the form of modeling patterns to ensure expressiveness and to clarify the semantics of service elements.
... UFO-A is an ontology of endurants [Guizzardi 2005], UFO-B is an ontology of events (perdurants) [Guizzardi et al. 2008] [Guizzardi et al., 2013], and UFO-C is an ontology of social entities built on the top of UFO-A and UFO-B [Guizzardi et al. 2008]. Our choice for using UFO can be justified by its successful application of this foundational ontology in previous works to evaluate, redesign, and ground ontologies, models, and frameworks of several research areas, such as Software Engineering, Conceptual Modeling, and Enterprise Modeling [Guizzardi et al. 2008] [Azevedo et al. 2011] [Almeida and Guizzardi 2012] [Bringuente et al. 2011]. ...
Supporting Goal-Oriented Requirement Engineering (GORE) in a systematic and comprehensive way may require the combination of distinct goal-oriented approaches. However, due to lack of common semantics, to combine these approaches can be challenging. In this work, we propose a semantic alignment between two complementary goal-oriented approaches: the ArchiMate Motivation Extension and the Goal-Question-Metric. The approaches are semantically analyzed in light of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO), which provides real-world semantics for both languages, serving as a reference ontology to support the ontological analysis of concepts and relationships of both approaches and the alignment between them.
... The semantic foundation employed here may be applied in such future efforts concerning the ''who'' column of several enterprise architecture frameworks and standards. We have ourselves recently performed the analysis of the ''community'' aspects of the RM-ODP language [52] using UFO, leading to a number of recommendations for standardization as reported in [2]. ...
... Thus, we intend to perform an ontological analysis of ArchiMate focusing on the service construct. This would contribute to the agenda we have been pursuing in the last decade towards well-founded enterprise modeling [26][27] [28][29]. We have focused on a core fragment of the service life cycle, leaving marketing-related phases (pre-service offer and post-service delivery) outside the scope of this paper. ...
The concept of "service" has been characterized by different disciplines and authors from various points of view. The variety of characterizations reveals that this notion, although an intuitive one, is far from trivial. Given the importance of services in enterprise computing and Service Science in general, we believe that a clear account of services and service-related concepts is necessary and would serve as a basis for communication, consensus and alignment of various approaches and perspectives. In this paper we propose a commitment-based account of the notion of service captured in a core reference ontology called UFO-S. We address the commitments established between service providers and customers, and show how such commitments affect the service lifecycle. We show that the commitment-based account can serve to harmonize different notions of service in the literature.
To cope with increasingly dynamic and competitive markets, enterprises need carefully formulated strategies in order to improve their processes, develop sustainable business models and offer more attractive products and services to their customers. To help them make sense of this complex environment, enterprises resort to an array of strategic business analysis tools and techniques, such as SWOT and the Business Model Canvas. Most of the tools, however, are derived from informally defined social and economic concepts, which hinders their reuse by practitioners. In this thesis, we address this limitation by means of in-depth ontological analyses conducted under the principles of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). In particular, we focus on the notions of value, risk and competition, as these are recurrently employed by many techniques and yet, still suffer conceptual and definitional shortcomings. One main contribution of this thesis is the Common Ontology of Value and Risk (COVER), a reference conceptual model that disentangle and clarifies several perspectives on value and risk, while demonstrating that they are ultimately two ends of the same spectrum. We demonstrate the usability and relevance of COVER by means of two applications in ArchiMate, an international standard for enterprise architecture representation. A second contribution is the Ontology of Competition, which formally characterizes competitive relationships and defines the nature of several competitive relationships arising in business markets.
Among models and information about economic phenomena that help to understand how enterprises produce value, Accounting and Financial Reporting still play a leading and regulative role. The regulative role is established by enforceable International Financial Reporting (FR) Standards. Ontology engineering methods, which have proven to cope with difficult standardization issues, are seldom used in developing these standards. Furthermore, no widely accepted computational ontology, covering the concepts and relations of FR, and the Information Systems supporting FR, exists. This paper proposes an initial version of the Core Ontology of Financial Reporting Information Systems (COFRIS) grounded on the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO).
This article describes how domain-specific modeling languages (DSML) are developed to specifically model certain domains and their phenomena. Over the last 15 years, different kinds of DSMLs have been ontologically analyzed to improve their ontological expressiveness. However, the term ‘ontological analyses’ encompasses a great variety of different purposes, techniques or methods, and can thus be performed in many different ways without maintaining clear differentiation. Therefore, in this article, the authors aim to structure the process of conducting an ontological analysis, and offers guidelines in the form of descriptive patterns for analyzing a DSML. With the help of this framework, a researcher with a specific purpose can recognize the required patterns and types of methods that can be followed in order to successfully conduct an ontological analysis and achieve the intended purpose.
Within an enterprise, different conceptual models, such as process, data, and goal models, are created by various stakeholders. These models are fundamentally based on similar underlying enterprise (domain) concepts, but they have a different focus, are represented using different modeling languages, take different viewpoints, utilize different terminology, and are used to develop different enterprise artefacts (such as documents, software, databases, etc.); therefore, they typically lack consistency and alignment. Another issue is that modelers have different vocabulary selections and different modeling styles. As a result, the enterprise can find itself accumulating a pile of models which cover similar aspects in different manners. Those models are not machine-readable and cannot be processed automatically. Enterprise-Specific Ontologies (ESOs) aim to solve this problem by serving as a reference during the conceptual model creation. Using such a shared semantic repository makes conceptual models semantically aligned and facilitates model integration. However, managing those ontologies is complicated; an enterprise is an evolving entity, and as it changes, the ESO might become outdated. During the years of research dedicated to this dissertation, the Recommendation-Based Conceptual Modeling and Ontology Evolution (CMOE+) framework was developed. This framework establishes a symbiotic relationship between the Ontology engineering and the Conceptual modeling fields. CMOE+ consists of two cycles: the Ontology Evolution cycle and the Conceptual Modeling cycle. The Ontology Evolution cycle is responsible for setting up the initial version of the ESO and updating it as the knowledge within the enterprise evolves. Additionally, this cycle encapsulates recommendation services to perform ontology look-up and to present the most relevant ESO concepts in support of the modeler. The Conceptual Modeling cycle is responsible for the creation of conceptual models in different modeling languages based on the ESO. This cycle is also concerned with the quality evaluation of the created models. CMOE+ was developed based on requirements identified as a result of a literature review and a case study. The development process follows the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM). After the initial version of CMOE+ was put forward, our focus was narrowed towards the recommendation-based conceptual modeling part of CMOE+, and we continued to gradually improve the framework in iterations until it reached its current state. The Ontology Evolution Cycle is not fully addressed within the scope of this dissertation. In order to demonstrate the performance and usability of CMOE+, it was exemplified for process modeling using BPMN and goal modeling using i*. This thesis presents a detailed instantiation, and explains steps to be performed in order to instantiate CMOE+ for other modeling languages. In order to evaluate the process modeling instance of CMOE+, a CMOE+BPMN tool was implemented. This tool incorporates a BPMN modeler, facilitates storage and access of the ESO, and includes all algorithms functioning within CMOE+ for the BPMN modeling language (as some of the algorithms are language dependent). Next, CMOE+ was exemplified using the i* goal modeling language. Finally, we demonstrated the ability of CMOE+ to perform alignment between i* and BPMN models, in order to show that CMOE+ is indeed beneficial in achieving interoperability among models created in different modeling languages and covering distinct aspects of the enterprise.
Enterprise architecture supports the analysis and design of business-oriented systems through the creation of complementary perspectives from multiple viewpoints over the business, information systems and technological infrastructure, enabling communication between stakeholders. However, enterprise architecture modelling languages lack representation schemas that support the computable assessment of its models. This paper applies model transformation to address this issue. The proposed approach translates models specified using ArchiMate into OWL. The resulting ontological representation is therefore computable, allowing for the analysis of the consistency and completeness of the enterprise architecture models. The applicability of the approach is shown through a case study. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2014.
This paper describes a long-term research program on developing ontological foundations for conceptual modeling. This program, organized around the theoretical background of the foundational ontology UFO (Unified Foundational Ontology), aims at developing theories, methodologies and engineering tools with the goal of advancing conceptual modeling as a theoretically sound discipline but also one that has concrete and measurable practical implications. The paper describes the historical context in which UFO was conceived, briefly discusses its stratified organization, and reports on a number of applications of this foundational ontology over more than a decade. In particular, it discusses the most successful application of UFO, namely, the development of the conceptual modeling language OntoUML. The paper also discusses a number of methodological and computational tools, which have been developed over the years to support the OntoUML community. Examples of these methodological tools include ontological patterns and anti-patterns; examples of these computational tools include automated support for pattern-based model construction, formal model verification, formal model validation via visual simulation, model verbalization, code generation and anti-pattern detection and rectification. In addition, the paper reports on a variety of applications in which the language as well as its associated tools have been employed to engineer models in several institutional contexts and domains. Finally, it reflects on some of these lessons learned by observing how OntoUML has been actually used in practice by its community and on how these have influenced both the evolution of the language as well as the advancement of some of the core ontological notions in UFO.
Enterprise architecture facilitates the alignment between different domains, such as business, applications and information technology. These domains must be described with description languages that best address the concerns of its stakeholders. However, current model-based enterprise architecture techniques are unable to integrate multiple descriptions languages either due to the lack of suitable extension mechanisms or because they lack the means to maintain the coherence, consistency and traceability between the representations of the multiple domains of the enterprise. On the other hand, enterprise architecture models are often designed and used for communication and not for automated analysis of its contents. Model analysis is a valuable tool for assessing the qualities of a model, such as conformance and completeness, and also for supporting decision making. This paper addresses these two issues found in model-based enterprise architecture: (1) the integration of domain description languages, and (2) the automated analysis of models. This proposal uses ontology engineering techniques to specify and integrate the different domains and reasoning and querying as a means to analyse the models. The utility of the proposal is shown through an evaluation scenario that involve the analysis of an enterprise architecture model that spans multiple domains.
The Resource-Event-Agent Enterprise Ontology (REA-EO) explicitly describes business knowledge in terms of domain concepts, relations between domain concepts, and axioms. In this paper, we reengineer the REA-EO based on an analysis of its modeling choices in terms of the Unified Foundational Ontology's (UFO) modeling principles. An important part of this analysis is the classification of the REA-EO primitives in terms of UFO. We further use an example to illustrate how REA-EO-driven conceptual modeling benefits from our reengineering efforts.
Use cases are the modeling technique of UML for formalizing the functional requirements placed on systems. This technique has limitations in modeling the context of a system, in relating systems involved in a same business process, in reusing use cases, and in specifying various constraints such as execution constraints between use case occurrences. These limitations can be overcome to some extent by the realization of multiple diagrams of various types, but with unclear relationships between them. Thus, the specification activity becomes complex and error prone. In this paper, we show how to overcome the limitations of use cases by making the roles of actors explicit. Interestingly, our contributions not only make UML a more expressive specification language, they also make it simpler to use and more consistent.
In this book we aim to explore the role of the external (social) environment in the regulation of cognitive autonomous agents' behaviours. In particular, the following issues are examined: how objective conditions and relations regulate social action, i.e., how they determine the agents' knowledge and motivations to act (their beliefs and goals) [and] how an autonomous agent becomes an instrument for external forces (an instrument for other agents' needs and requests, as well as for social conventions, norms, laws, etc.).
We endeavour to show that cognition is a fundamental medium between individual action and external (social) forces, cognitive medium meaning the mental interpretation and processing of these external forces.
[The audience for this book includes] all interested in computer science and its applications, particulary to theories of action and agent architecture, multi-agent systems and distributed AI [artificial intelligence], computer supported co-operative work (CSCW), etc.; cognitive scientists, philosophers and psychologists [and] social scientists, especially sociologists and theorists of rationality, game-theorists and social simulators. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This paper proposes a pattern for the main categories of abstraction mechanisms used in conceptual modelling. This pattern builds upon Geerts' and McCarthy's analysis of policy-level specifications, adding a conceptual relations ship (i.e. extension) that is not explicitly addressed by them although it is contained in the unified foundational ontology (i.e. UFO). As this reference model is an extension to Geerts and McCarthy's work on policy-specifications, it is ideal for extending the REA reference model with abstraction mechanisms.
This position paper revisits the requirements for the set of Foundation Concepts for the ODP Reference Model and the approach originally taken to satisfying them. It then examines, in the light of experience, the areas where the Foundations have subsided, and areas where extensions need to be built. The aim is to provide a starting point for discussion on requirements to change the Foundations document.
This paper presents a preliminary proposal of an ontology of organisations based on descriptive ontology for linguistic and cognitive engineering (DOLCE). An ontological analysis of organisations is the first, fundamental and ineliminable pillar on which to build a precise and rigorous enterprise modelling. An ontological analysis makes explicit the social structure that underlies every organisational settings. In particular, the paper tries to explain what are organisations, roles and norms, how they are interrelated, what it means for a norm to be valid in an organisation and what it means for an agent to be affiliated to an organisation.. His main interests are in social ontology, collective intentionality and political philosophy. He collaborates with the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (ISTC-CNR) in Trento, Italy. Roberta Ferrario received her PhD in Philosophy in co-tutorship at the University of Milan and at the University Marc Bloch of Strasbourg in 2003 with a dissertation on counterfactual reasoning. Currently she is a Researcher at LOA in Trento and she is working on ontology of organisations, ontology of mental entities, of services and e-government.
While business processes and business goals are considered intrinsically interdependent, a comprehensive modeling approach that includes both the business process and the goal perspectives is still lacking. This paper proposes a semantic integration between the domains of goal modeling and business process modeling. We integrate the ARIS framework with the Tropos goal modeling language. While ARIS is widely employed for business process modeling, it offers an overly simplistic set of goal-related concepts. In contrast, Tropos offers a rich set of goal-related concepts (and associated goal analysis methods), while refraining from addressing business process modeling in detail. In order to investigate the relation between the Tropos modeling constructs and the ARIS elements, we propose an ontological account for both architectural domains through the usage of the UFO ontology.
Based on the paradigm of Constructive Descriptions and Situations, we introduce NIC, an ontology of social collectives that includes social agents, plans, norms, and the conceptual relations between them.
Norms are distinguished from plans, and their relations are formalized. A typology of social collectives is also proposed,
including collection of agents, knowledge community, intentional collective, and normative intentional collective. NIC, represented as a first-order theory as well as a description logic for applications requiring automated reasoning, provides
the expressivity to talk about the contexts (social, informational, circumstantial, and conceptual), in which collectives
make and produce sense within the interplay of plans and norms.
abstract object and this abstract object itself The Husserl of the Logical Investigations admits, in our terms, that mental acts are real events, real changes in the relevant subject, but he rules out (albeit implicitly) the possibility of going further and admitting that they may also be real relations That all veridical acts can be described by relational sentences is however recognised by Husserl It follows that he would accept also that all such acts are at least Cambridge relational in the sense of our discussion in 2 4 above Indeed we may say that intentionality, for Husserl, is itself a Cambridge relation But now the flaw in Husserl's treatment is also clear: he acknowledges no difference between, on the one hand, acts of merely descriptional thinking about the tallest spy, where
While conceptual modeling is strongly related to the final quality of the software product, conceptual modeling itself remains a challenging activity. In particular, modelers must ensure that conceptual models properly formalize their intended conceptualization of a domain. This paper proposes an approach to facilitate the validation process of conceptual models defined in OntoUML by transforming these models into specifications in the logic-based language Alloy and using its analyzer to generate instances of the model and assertion counter-examples. By allowing the observation of sequences of snapshots of model instances, the dynamics of object creation, classification, association and destruction are revealed. This confronts the modeler with the implications of modeling choices and allows them to uncover mistakes or gain confidence in the quality of conceptual models.
KeywordsConceptual modeling-OntoUML-Validation-Lightweight formal methods-Alloy
In this paper we present a framework for the evaluation and (re)design of modeling languages. We focus here on the evaluation
of the suitability of a language to model a set of real-world phenomena in a given domain. In our approach, this property
can be systematically evaluated by comparing the level of homomorphism between a concrete representation of the worldview
underlying the language (captured in a metamodel of the language), with an explicit and formal representation of a conceptualization
of that domain (a reference ontology). The framework proposed comprises a number of properties that must be reinforced for
an isomorphism to take place between these two entities. In order to illustrate the approach proposed, we evaluate and extend
a fragment of the UML static metamodel for the purpose of conceptual modeling, by comparing it with an excerpt of a philosophically
and cognitive well-founded reference ontology.
In a series of publications, we have employed ontological theories and principles to evaluate and improve the quality of conceptual
modeling grammars and models. In this article, we continue this work by conducting an ontological analysis to investigate
the proper representation of types whose instances are collectives, as well as the representation of a specific part-whole relation involving them, namely, the member-collective relation. As a result, we provide an ontological interpretation for these notions, as well as modeling guidelines for their
sound representation in conceptual modeling.
Keywordsrepresentation of collectives and their members-ontological foundations for conceptual modeling-part-whole relations
Our goal in this paper is to introduce and motivate a methodology, called Tropos,1 for building agent oriented software systems. Tropos is based on two key ideas. First, the notion of agent and all related mentalistic notions (for instance goals and plans) are used in all phases of software development, from early analysis down to the actual implementation. Second, Tropos covers also the very early phases of requirements analysis, thus allowing for a deeper understanding of the environment where the software must operate, and of the kind of interactions that should occur between software and human agents. The methodology is illustrated with the help of a case study. The Tropos language for conceptual modeling is formalized in a metamodel described with a set of UML class diagrams.
The intuitive simplicity of the so-called is-a (or subsumption) relationship has led to widespread ontological misuse. Where previous work has focused largely on the semantics of the relationship itself, we concentrate here on the ontological nature of its arguments, in order to tell whether a single is-a link is ontologically well-founded. For this purpose, we introduce some techniques based on the philosophical notions of identity, unity, and essence, which have been adapted to the needs of taxonomy design. We demonstrate the effectiveness of these techniques by taking real examples of poorly structured taxonomies, and revealing cases of invalid generalization.
The main goal of this paper is a preliminary characterization of the categories of the realm of the mental, able to fit and integrate the foundational ontology DOLCE (a Descriptive Ontology for Linguistic and Cognitive Engineering); we call this module COM (Computational Ontology of Mind). The idea of COM emerges from the need of a conceptual clarification from the standpoint of formal ontology of the entities that play a role in agent technologies for information systems. Based on philosophical tradition, we have singled out a central relation in the realm of the mental: aboutness. In our proposal aboutness connects a mental state with a mental object, at a certain time, and with respect to a given intentional agent. Furthermore, we envisage a generalization of this framework to mental processes and events. Thus, in the paper we give a first analysis of these entities, mainly focused on mental objects and their characteristics. We are also specifying the basic features of mental states and intentional agents, exploiting ontological categories and relations implemented in DOLCE
The "motivation domain" of an Enterprise Architecture addresses objectives in a broad scope ranging from high-level statements expressing the goals of an enterprise to declarations of requirements on business processes, services and systems. An important development regarding the incorporation of the motivation domain in a comprehensive Enterprise Architecture modeling language is the upcoming Motivational Extension to ArchiMate (based on the ARMOR language). The extension proposes the inclusion of concepts such as concerns, assessments, goals, principles and requirements to ArchiMate. We believe that careful definition of the semantics of these concepts is required, especially when considering that the motivation domain addresses subjective aspects of the enterprise. To address that, this paper focuses on an ontology-based semantics for the Motivation Extension. We interpret the concepts by using the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) as a semantic domain, and, as a result, propose well-founded recommendations for improvements of the extension.
The “goal domain” addresses objectives in a broad scope ranging from high-level statements expressing the vision and mission of an organization (or community) to declarations of the results that must be achieved by business process execution. This paper reviews the support for the goal domain in ISO RM-ODP. We analyze the conceptualization for goals (objectives) in the reference model's Enterprise Viewpoint using a fragment of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) that deals with some aspects of social reality and intentionality. The interpretation of the RM-ODP concepts in terms of this foundation may help to provide a sound underpinning for these concepts and support the identification of possible extensions of the reference model.
This paper focuses on the issue of ontological interpretation for the ARIS organization modeling language with the following contributions: (i) providing real-world semantics to the primitives of the language by using the UFO foundational ontology as a semantic domain, (ii) the identification of inappropriate elements of the language, using a systematic ontology-based analysis approach, and (iii) recommendations for improvements of the language to resolve the issues identified.
Foundational Ontologies are theoretically well-founded domain- independent systems of categories that have been su ccessfully used to improve the quality of conceptual modeling languages and models. In this paper, we pre- sent the latest developments in the UFO ontology. M oreover, we elaborate on the relevance of these foundational ontologies in t he development of domain ontologies by showing a case study in the software process domain.
Societies need patterned behavior to exist. Large-scale agent societies may contain a diversity of agents, each with differing abilities and functionalities. When such an agent system is given a task, it must dynamically muster together a group of agents that collectively have the capability to accomplish the task. To do this, the agent society needs to be able to understand its agents and their potential interactions.
This paper contains a proposed superstructure specification that defines the user-level constructs required to model agents, their roles and their groups. These modeling constructs provide the basic foundational elements required in multi-agent systems to foster dynamic group formation and operation. As agent systems scale beyond the point where an individual organization can track and control their behavior, the use of these concepts within the society will facilitate dynamic, controlled, task-oriented group formation. This in turn will enhance the predictability, reliability and stability of the agent system as a whole, as well as facilitating the analysis of both group and system behavior.
Abstract The aim of these notes is to introduce some notions of Commitment which are crucial for the understanding of groups and organizations’ functioning, and of the relations between individual agents and collective activity. I try to identify some of the basic ingredients of such notions, and to make some steps towards their formalization. In particular, I claim that a notion of Commitment is needed as a mediation between the individual and the collective one. Before constructing a notion of "Collective or Group Commitment" a notion of "Social Commitment" is to be defined. "Social commitment" is not an individual Commitment,shared,by many agents; it is the Commitment of one agent to another agent. I stress the normative contents (entitlements/obligations) of this social relation, and its connections with individual intentions and collective activity. On that basis, a notion of Organi~,ational Commitment is proposed, that could account for the structure of stable Organizations, and the related notions of "role" and of "power of command". This view, ba.q~d on one side on the intrinsic normative aspects of Social Commitment, and on the other side on the dependence and power relations that found a team, a group, an Organization, is quite in contrast with the "conversationar’ view of Organization in which agents seem to be completely free to negotiate and establish any
This paper offers two main contributions. On the one hand, it establishes a general formal framework for developing a foundational ontology of socially constructed entities, in the broadest sense of this notion; on the other hand, it further contributes to understanding the ontological nature of roles. The key choice here is to put all social entities in the domain of discourse: besides social individuals, we also consider 'reified' social concepts and roles, as well as their descriptions, i.e, the 'social conventions' or 'contexts' that define them. This allows us to formally characterize in a first-order theory the relationships among all these entities.
The software agent paradigm has received considerable at- tention recently, both in research and industrial practice. However, adop- tion of this software paradigm remains elusive in software engineering practice. We claim that part of the adoption problem lies with the fact that mentalistic and social concepts underlying agents are subjective and complex for the average practitioner. Specifically, although there are many efforts related to the topic coming from philosophy, cogni- tive sciences and computer science, a uniform and well-founded semantic view on these concepts is currently lacking. This work extends an ex- isting upper-level ontology and offers it as a foundation for evaluating and designing agent-oriented modeling languages. In particular, the pa- per focuses on the concept of goal, aiming at disambiguating its defini- tion, discussing its different manifestations, and clarifying its relation to other important agent-related concepts. For that, we examine how goals are conceived and used according to some relevant literature on agent- orientation. In addition, related work on akin fields, especially philosophy and AI are used as a basis for the proposed ontological extensions.
Agent-based systems are no longer contained within the boundaries of a single, small agent organization. To meet the demands of large-scale sys- tem implementations, agent organizations must deal with environmental forces, interact with other agent organizations, and know how they affect individual agents. In this paper, we look to social and organizational systems theory as a source of inspiration. Many of these techniques have been successful for a hundreds and thousands of years. We believe that the designers of agent-based systems can learn a great deal from organization designers. In the first of a se- ries, this paper examines the notion of role and its implications on how agents might behave in group settings.
This paper presents an ontological analysis of the EPC (Event-driven Process Chain) business process modeling notation supported in the ARIS Toolset. This ontological analysis provides an interpretation of the modeling elements in EPC diagrams in terms of the UFO foundational ontology. This enables us to define the precise real-world semantics for business process models represented through EPCs and allows us to identify problems affecting the clarity and expressiveness of EPCs. In our analysis, we consider an up-to-date metamodel of the ARIS Method that we have defined in our earlier work, which specifies EPCs as currently supported by the ARIS Toolset. To the best of our knowledge, the interpretation proposed here is presently the most complete ontological account for EPCs.
Parthood is a relation of fundamental importance in a number of dis* ciplines including cognitive science, linguistics and conceptual modeling. How* ever, one classical problem for conceptual modeling theories of parthood is de* ciding on the transitivity of these relations. This issue is of great importance since transitivity plays a fundamental role both conceptually (e.g., to afford in* ferences in problem*solving) and computationally (e .g., to afford propagations of properties and events in a transitive chain). In this article we address this problem by presenting a solution to the case of part*whole relations between functional complexes, which are the most common types of entities represented in conceptual models. This solution comes in two parts. Firstly, we present a formal theory founded on results from formal ontology and linguistics. Second* ly, we use this theory to provide a number of visual patterns that can be used to isolate scopes of transitivity in part*whole relati ons represented in diagrams.
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.
Within the information systems field, reference models have been known for many years. A reference model is a conceptual framework and may be used as a blueprint for information systems development. Despite the relevance of reference model quality, little research has been undertaken on their systematical evaluation. In this paper, we propose an approach to evaluate reference models based on the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology. We demonstrate that this application is possible and useful for model evaluation and several other areas. The main idea of our approach is the ontological normalization of a reference model. An ontological normalization is comparable with the normalization of a database schema but considers the structure of reality and not technical aspects. The ontological normalization of a reference model consists of four steps: (1) Developing a transformation mapping, (2) Identifying ontological modeling deficiencies, (3) Transforming the reference model, and (4) Assessing the results. Although our approach is based on sound theory, we argue that this approach is not inherently superior to other approaches of reference model evaluation.
In this paper, we provide a semantic foundation for role-related concepts in Enterprise Modelling. We use a conceptual modelling framework to provide a well-founded underpinning for these concepts. We review a number of Enterprise Modelling approaches in light of the concepts described (namely, ARIS, Archimate, DoDAF, RM- ODP and BPMN). This allows us to understand the various approaches, to contrast them and to identify problems in their definition and/or usage. We start with a core set of concepts and then extend this set to address the social aspects of actors and roles in an organization. In particular, this enables us to investigate the actor-role relations in further detail.
Focuses on the process of engineering ontologies for use in information systems in the United States. Requirements for developing an ontology engineering practice; Basis of OntoClean methodology; Applications of the methodology.
In 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
General Ontological Language (GOL) is a formal framework for representing and building ontologies. The purpose of GOL is to provide a system of top-level ontologies which can be used as a basis for building domain-specific ontologies. The present paper gives an overview about the basic categories of the GOL-ontology. GOL is part of the work of the research group Ontologies in Medicine (Onto-Med) at the University of Leipzig which is based on the collaborative work of the Institute of Medical Informatics (IMISE) and the Institute for Computer Science (IfI). It represents work in progress toward a proposal for an integrated family of top-level ontologies and will be applied to several fields of medicine, in particular to the field of Clinical Trials.
This research note shows that the scope of conceptual data modeling patterns can be identified, clarified, and explicitly represented by positioning them into an ontology-based framework. A clear and explicit definition of scope could help deciding which patterns match which parts of the domain to be represented. The authors demonstrate their argument by positioning existing conceptual data modeling patterns into a two-dimensional structuring framework that is constructed using two ontology-derived ‘benchmark’ patterns: an enterprise pattern for representing transactions (derived from the REA domain ontology) and an abstraction pattern for representing reality at different levels of abstraction (derived from the UFO foundational ontology). By means of an application scenario dealing with the conceptual design of a transactional enterprise database, the authors illustrate how the framework can be used to evaluate the relevancy and completeness of candidate patterns with respect to the problem at hand.
UML’s current definition of the role concept comes with many problems, not the least being that it is difficult to understand
and communicate. This paper proposes a revised UML metamodel building on a much simpler role definition. Moreover, it replaces
the rather unusual notions of association role and association end role as well as the rarely used association generalization
with the more popular concept of overloading, thereby leading to a considerable reduction in the number of modelling concepts.
Despite the rather radical nature of the proposed alterations, no changes in UML notation become necessary. However, a notable
change in modelling style including in particular a clearer separation of structure and interaction diagrams are among the
likely effects of the proposed revision.
In ODP, an enterprise specification is expressed in terms of the definition of some set of communities, characterized by their community contracts. A community places constraints on its members, restricting the behaviour they can participate in. This may involve a stronger form of constraint than those which result from the traditional binding of objects at interfaces, which requires only that the communication between the objects has some observable properties. This paper discusses the different forms of constraints, and examines the range of forms that community construction may take. In particular, it examines the process of abstracting from a community to yield a community object, and then using this object to fill some role in a broader community. It shows that the role filling process needs to consider mappings and constraints between objects that fill other roles in the communities concerned.
A taxonomy of part-whole or meronymic relations is developed to explain the ordinary English-speaker's use of the term “part of” and its cognates. The resulting classification yields six types of meronymic relations: 1. component-integral object (pedal-bike), 2. member-collection (ship-fleet), 3. portion-mass (slice-pie), 4. stuff-object (steel-car), 5. feature-activity (paying-shopping), and 6. place-area (Everglades-Florida). Meronymic relations ore further distinguished from other inclusion relations, such as spatial inclusion, and class inclusion, and from several other semantic relations: attribution, attachment, and ownership. This taxonomy is then used to explain cases of apparent intransitivity in merological syllogisms, and standard form syllogisms whose premises express different inclusion relations. The data suggest that intransitivities arise due to equivocations between different types of semantic relations. These results are then explained by means of the relation element theory which accounts for the character and behavior of semantic relations in terms of more primitive relational elements. The inferential phenomena observed are then explained by means of a single principle of element matching.
The duality of objects and relationships is so deeply embedded in our thinking that almost all modelling languages include it as a fundamental distinction. Yet there is evidence that the two are naturally complemented by a third, equally fundamental notion: that of roles. Although definitions of the role concept abound in the literature, we maintain that only few are truly original, and that even fewer acknowledge the intrinsic role of roles as intermediaries between relationships and the objects that engage in them. After discussing the major families of role conceptualizations, we present our own basic definition and demonstrate how it naturally accounts for many modelling issues, including multiple and dynamic classification, object collaboration, polymorphism, and substitutability.
The paper shows how a system of important concepts and approaches proposed by system thinkers (such as philosophers, mathematicians, engineers, and computing scientists) and described in international (ISO) standards has been used to understand and specify various kinds of business and IT systems, and to base IT work on a solid foundation that has been used for communicating with non-IT experts, thus establishing successful and meaningful interactions between business and IT experts and organizations. These common elegant concepts — such as abstraction, system, structure, relationship, composition, pattern, name in context, etc. — come from exact philosophy and mathematics. They have been stable for centuries, and have been successfully used in theory, in industrial practice (including international standards), and in teaching of business and IT modeling. The essential stable semantics of these fundamental concepts and of systems specified using them ought to be clearly separated from the accidental (often IT-industry-imposed excessively complex and rapidly changing) details. The paper includes two case studies of applying the approach – with demonstrable success – in a large financial institution and in a leading publishing company.
In this paper a theory of delegation is presented. There are at least three reasons for developing such a theory. First, one of the most relevant notions of “agent” is based on the notion of “task” and of “on behalf of”. In order to found this notion a theory of delegation among agents is needed. Second, the notion of autonomy should be based on different kinds and levels of delegation. Third, the entire theory of cooperation and collaboration requires the definition of the two complementary attitudes of goal delegation and adoption linking collaborating agents.After motivating the necessity for a principled theory of delegation (and adoption) the paper presents a plan-based approach to this theory. We analyze several dimensions of the delegation/adoption (on the basis of the interaction between the agents, of the specification of the task, of the possibility to subdelegate, of the delegation of the control, of the help levels). The agent's autonomy and levels of agency are then deduced. We describe the modelling of the client from the contractor's point of view and vice versa, with their differences, and the notion of trust that directly derives from this modelling.Finally, a series of possible conflicts between client and contractor are considered: in particular collaborative conflicts, which stem from the contractor's intention to help the client beyond its request or delegation and to exploit its own knowledge and intelligence (reasoning, problem solving, planning, and decision skills) for the client itself.
UML's current definition of the role concept comes with many problems, not the least being that it is difficult to understand and communicate. This paper proposes a revised UML metamodel building on a much simpler role definition. Moreover, it replaces the rather unusual notions of association role and association end role as well as the rarely used association generalization with the more popular concept of overloading, thereby leading to a considerable reduction in the number of modelling concepts. Despite the rather radical nature of the proposed alterations, no changes in UML notation become necessary. However, a notable change in modelling style including in particular a clearer separation of structure and interaction diagrams are among the likely effects of the proposed revision.