Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling with UFO, gUFO, and OntoUML
Conceptual Modeling is about creating concrete artifacts that are meant to represent our conceptualizations (i.e., our mental models) of reality for the purpose of communication, domain understanding, problem-solving and meaning negotiation. The artifacts produced by this activity (i.e., Conceptual Models), thus, serve as an interface between reality and human cognition. For this reason, conceptual modeling languages and conceptual models should be designed by taking very seriously the nature of reality as structured by human cognition, i.e., by systematically employing the-called Descriptive Ontologies. This tutorial revisits a 20-year effort in creating one such Descriptive Ontology, namely, the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO), as well as a set of conceptual modeling tools based on it. These include the modeling language OntoUML, a number of patterns and anti-patterns associated with this language, as well as a recent lightweight implementation of UFO termed gUFO (gentle UFO), which supports the construction of UFO-informed knowledge structuring artifacts (e.g., Knowledge Graphs). The tutorial illustrates these tools in a number of real-world scenarios.
Giancarlo Guizzardi is a Full Professor of Software Science and Evolution as well as Chair and Department Head of Semantics, Cybersecurity & Services (SCS) at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. He is also an Affiliated/Guest Professor at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV) at Stockholm University, in Sweden. He has been active for nearly three decades in the areas of Formal and Applied Ontology, Conceptual Modelling, Business Informatics, and Information Systems Engineering, working with a multi-disciplinary approach in Computer Science that aggregates results from Philosophy, Cognitive Science, Logics and Linguistics. He is one of the key developers of UFO, gUFO and OntoUML. Over the years, he has delivered keynote speeches in several key international conferences in these fields (e.g., ER, BPM, CAiSE, IEEE ICSC). He is currently an associate editor of a number of journals including Applied Ontology and Data & Knowledge Engineering, a co-editor of the Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing series, and a member of several international journal editorial boards. Finally, he is a member of the Steering Committees of ER, EDOC, and IEEE CBI, and of the Advisory Board of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications (IAOA).