Annals of Computer Science and Information Systems, Volume 11

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15439/2017F001

Citation: Proceedings of the 2017 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, M. Ganzha, L. Maciaszek, M. Paprzycki (eds). ACSIS, Vol. 11, pages 1–10 (2017)

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Abstract. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of ontological theories in the philosophical sense (Foundational Ontologies) to analyze and (re)design conceptual modeling languages. This paper is about an ontologically well-founded conceptual modeling language in this tradition, termed OntoUML. This language embeds a number of \emph{ontological patterns} that reflect the micro-theories comprising a particular foundational ontology named UFO. We here (re)define OntoUML as a formal graph grammar and demonstrate how the models of this language can be constructed by the combined application of ontological patterns following a number of graph transformation rules. As a result, we obtain a version of this language fully defined as a formal \emph{Ontology Pattern Grammar}. In other words, this paper presents a formal definition of OntoUML that is both explicit in terms of the ontological patterns that it incorporates and is completely independent of the UML meta-model.

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