Tutorial: Using UFO as a Reference Ontology in the (Re-)Design of Enterprise Modelling Languages

Abstract

Conceptual modeling has been considered a key activity in enterprise architecture and information systems engineering, and comprises the use of diagrammatic languages for communication, understanding and problem solving regarding a universe of discourse. The effectiveness of a modeling language for the aforementioned tasks is strongly related to the languages domain appropriateness, i.e., To the language's ability to express the relevant characteristics of the domain at hand. A language designer must, therefore, understand the phenomena (or domain) that should be covered by the language and propose symbolic structures that will empower prospective language users to efficiently carry out certain tasks concerning the represented phenomena. This requires the design of a language with some form of correspondence between its constructs and things in the external world, which we call real-world semantics. Although essential to language design and semantic interoperability tasks, the real-world semantics of conceptual modeling languages for the enterprise is often defined only informally with no rigor or methodological support for the language designer. As a consequence, a number of language issues may arise, including lack of semantic clarity and expressiveness, which ultimately affect the language's ability to serve as a basis for communication, analysis and transformation. In this tutorial, we will discuss advances in the last decade concerning the application of reference ontologies to address these issues. We will show how well-founded reference ontologies can serve to inform the design and revision of enterprise modeling languages. In order to provide a solid basis for reference ontologies, we will discuss the role of a foundational ontology in this process (the Unified Foundational Ontology, UFO). A number of concrete cases of language revision will be discussed involving Archi Mate and other languages, encompassing different enterprise architectural domains (such as services, capabilities, goals, organizational structure, etc.).