Ontobras 2019 - Keynote Speech: Conceptual Models as Ontological Contracts - By Giancarlo Guizzardi

Ontobras 2019 - Keynote Speech: Conceptual Models as Ontological Contracts
By Giancarlo Guizzardi
*My own comments are marked with an asterisk

“data are fragments of a theory of the real world, and data processing juggles representations of these fragments of theory...The issue is ontology, or the question of what exists.” (G.H. Mealy,  Another Look at Data, 1967)

Any artifact from which data can be extracted makes an ontological commitment, i.e. expresses  fragments of a theory.

Giancarlo explained the Twin Tower Case (available in the slides)

Regarding this case:

• There is no doubt about the brute reality. The issue is interpreting that part of reality according to a certain system of categories
• There are multiple views on reality that can conflict and unless we are fully aware of their distinctions, we cannot safely harmonize those views
• The is no experiment that can be done to settle these conflicts. It can only be resolve by conceptual clarification and meaning negotiation relying on a prioristic system of categories  

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Ontology as a Calculus of Content: a prior set of system categories as in foundational ontologies are necessary to provide an ontological analysis methodology to deal with the interpretation of reality.

Giancarlo explained the OntoUML taxonomy of Type using Mick Jagger as an example (see slides).
*OntoUML Wikipedia entry

OntoUML is a pattern language, since some of the concepts always appear together in a model. For example, a Role always specializes a Kind, so that the instances of the Role may take their identity principle from the Kind.

Giancarlo demonstrated the use of the Menthor Editor to create a model based on OntoUML patterns.

Some of the axiomatization comes for free with the OntoUML pattern.

Domain-specific axioms should be added to constrain the model, but also to express derived relation and the like.

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There is an OntoUML Benchmark: a repository of models in OntoUML.

Giancarlo described the work on Ontological Anti-patterns (see slides) and some results of an experiment conducted to find antipatterns in the OntoUML Benchmark.

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Finding patterns and anti-patterns in WikiData

Work in collaboration with João Paulo and Fred Brasileiro:  an experiment to find Multi-level Theory (MLT) patterns and anti-patterns in WikiData.

Example of problem found: 

Results of the experiment: 

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In the Q&A part, there was a lively discussion regarding the comparison of different Ontology languages.

Alloy is a very good ontology representation language, especially in terms of model simulation.

OntoUML vs. OWL

The languages are actually not competing at all, since one is dedicated to conceptual modeling and has no concern for computational tractability and the other is an ontology implementation language.

Giancarlo made a strong statement saying that there is no ontology in OWL although he acknowledges the value of such language in terms of providing a computationally tractable language and its benefits for web-based development.

Mathias highlighted that the issues of computationally tractability is a common issue not only restricted to ontology languages, and an important one.