Ontological foundations for conceptual modelling

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Etymologically, the term “ontology” means the study of existence. In philosophy, ontology is the branch of metaphysics concerned with the fundamental nature of being, addressing deep questions such as “Do nonphysical things exist?”, “Does an object remain identical to itself when it undergoes change?”, and so on. Ontology in this sense is a mature discipline, with a history of systematic development in western philosophy at least since Aristotle. The business of ontology “. . . is to study the most general features of reality” (Peirce, 1935), as opposed to the several specific scientific disciplines (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology), which deal only with entities that fall within their respective domain. However, there are many ontological principles that are utilized in scientific research, for instance, in the selection of concepts and hypotheses, in the axiomatic reconstruction of scientific theories, in the design of techniques, and in the evaluation of scientific results (Bunge, 1977, p. 19). Thus, to quote the physicist and philosopher of science Mario Bunge, “every science presupposes some metaphysics”. In the beginning of the 20th century, the philosopher Edmund Husserl coined the term “formal ontology” as analogous to formal logic. Whilst formal logic deals with formal logical structures (e.g., truth, validity, consistency) independently of their veracity, formal ontology deals with formal ontological structures (e.g., theory of parthood, types and instantiation, identity, dependence, unity), i.e., with formal aspects of entities irrespective of their particular nature. The unfolding of formal ontology as a philosophical discipline aims at developing a system of general categories that can be used in the development of scientific theories and domain-specific common sense theories of reality. According to Smith (2004), the term “ontology” in the computer and information science literature appeared for the first time in 1967, in a work on the foundations of data modeling by S.H. Mealy, in a passage where he distinguishes three distinct realms in the field of data processing, namely: (i) “the real world itself ”; (ii) “ideas about it existing in the minds of men”; (iii) “symbols on paper or some other storage medium”. This view bears obvious resemblance to the famous semiotic triangle of Ogden & Richards (1923). Mealy concludes the passage arguing about the existence of things in the world