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Ontological Foundations for Conceptual Part-Whole
Relations: The Case of Collectives and Their Parts
Giancarlo Guizzardi
Ontology and Conceptual Modeling Research Group (NEMO),
Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), Vitória (ES), Brazil
gguizzardi@inf.ufes.br
Abstract.
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 advance this research program by
conducting an ontological analysis to investigate the proper representation of
types whose instances are
collectives
, as well as the representation of
part-whole relations involving them. As a result, we provide an ontological in-
terpretation for these notions, as well as modeling guidelines for their sound
representation in conceptual modeling. Moreover, we present a precise qualifi-
cation for the parthood relations of
member-collective
and
subcollective-
collective
in terms of formal mereological theories of parthood, as well as in
terms of the modal meta-properties of
essential
and
inseparable
parts.
Keywords:
ontological foundations for conceptual modeling, part-whole rela-
tions, representation of collectives.
1 Introduction
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the application of Foundational
Ontologies, i.e., formal ontological theories in the philosophical sense, for providing
real-world semantics for conceptual modeling languages, and theoretically sound
foundations and methodological guidelines for evaluating and improving the individ-
ual models produced using these languages.
In a series of publications, we have successfully employed ontological theories and
principles to analyze a number of fundamental conceptual modeling constructs such
as Types, Roles and Taxonomic Structures, Relations, Attributes, among others (e.g.,
[1,2]). In this article we continue this work by investigating a specific aspect of the
representation of part-whole relations. In particular, we focus on the ontological
analysis of
collectives
and the part-whole relations involving them. The focus on
collectives is timely given the increasing recognition of the importance of finding
well-founded manners to represent collectives in domains such as bioinformatics in
which collectives and their parts abound [3,4].
Parthood is a relation of fundamental importance in conceptual modeling, being
present as a modeling primitive in practically all major conceptual modeling lan-
guages. Motivated by this, a number of attempts have been made to employ theories
of different sorts to provide a foundation for part-whole relations. These initiatives
