Ontological foundations for conceptual part-whole relations: The case of collectives and their parts

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 interpretation for these notions, as well as modeling guidelines for their sound representation in conceptual modeling. Moreover, we present a precise qualification 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. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.