OntoUML is an

ontologically In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exis ...

well-founded language for

Ontology In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exis ...

-driven Conceptual Modeling. OntoUML is built as a UML extension based on the

Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) Unified may refer to: * The Unified, a wine symposium held in Sacramento, California, USA * ''Unified'', the official student newspaper of Canterbury Christ Church University * UNFD, an Australian record label * ''Unified'' (Sweet & Lynch album), ...

. The foundations of UFO and OntoUML can be traced back to

Giancarlo Guizzardi Giancarlo Guizzardi (born 1975 in Vitoria, Brazil) is a Brazilian–Italian computer scientist specializing in conceptual modeling, enterprise modeling, applied ontology and ontology-driven information systems. He is a professor in the computer s ...

's Ph.D. thesis "''Ontological foundations for structural conceptual models''". In his work, he proposed a novel foundational ontology for conceptual modeling (

UFO An unidentified flying object (UFO), more recently renamed by US officials as a UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon), is any perceived aerial phenomenon that cannot be immediately identified or explained. On investigation, most UFOs are id ...

) and employed it to evaluate and re-design a fragment of the UML 2.0 metamodel for the purposes of conceptual modeling and domain ontology engineering. OntoUML has been adopted by many academic, corporate and governmental institutions worldwide for the development of conceptual models in a variety of domains. Finally, some of the foundational theories underlying OntoUML have also influenced other popular conceptual modeling languages such as ORM 2.0.

Supporting tools

In 2006, Guizzardi co-founded the Ontology & Conceptual Modeling Research Group (NEMO) located at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES) in Vitória city, state of Espírito Santo,

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

. Since then, NEMO has been responsible for most of the developments in OntoUML. These include tool support to the language both as extensions of UML production-grade tools to support OntoUML (e.g., the MDG for Enterprise Architect), as well as a standalone tool called th
OntoUML Lightweight Editor (OLED)
for the development, verification, validation, anti-pattern detection and rectification, verbalization and implementation of domain ontologies. Several papers about ontologies and OntoUML have been authored by members of the NEMO group. In 2016 a group of former students from NEMO founded Menthor, a startup aiming at providing ontology engineering-related products and services. Among these products, they offer the Menthor Editor, an open-source ontology engineering tool for dealing with OntoUML models. It also includes OntoUML syntax validation, Alloy simulation, 3] Anti-Pattern verification, and MDA transformations from OntoUML to OWL, 6] SBVR and Natural Language (Brazilian Portuguese). Menthor Editor is derived from OLED. In 2017, as an initiative championed by the Czech Technical University in Czech Republic, an OntoUML portal has been launched.{{cite web, title=OntoUML Portal, url=https://ontouml.org/

Supporting tools

References

See also