Ontological meta-properties of derived object types

Abstract

In this paper, we revisit a number of classical formal meta-properties that have been used in the conceptual modeling and ontology engineering literature to provide finer-grained distinctions among the category of Object Types. These distinctions constitute an essential part of relevant existing approaches, in particular, the ontology-driven conceptual modeling language OntoUML, and the ontology and taxonomy evaluation methodology OntoClean. The idea in this paper is to investigate the interaction between these meta-properties and Derived Object Types, i.e., Object Types which extensions are dynamically inferred via Derivation Rules. The contributions here are two-fold: firstly, we revisit two classical Derivation Patterns and prove a number of results that can be used to infer the modal meta-properties of Derived Types from those of the types participating in the associated derivation rules; secondly, we demonstrate how these results can be applied in the automated support for model construction in OntoUML. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.