On the General Ontological Foundations of Conceptual Modeling

As pointed out in the pioneering work of [WSW99,EW01], an upper level ontology allows to evaluate the ontological correctness of a conceptual model and to develop guidelines how the constructs of a conceptual modeling language should be used. In this paper we adopt the General Ontological Language (GOL), proposed in [DHHS01], for this purpose. We discuss a number of issues that arise when applying the concepts of GOL to UML class diagrams as a conceptual modeling language. We also compare our ontological analysis of some parts of the UML with the one proposed in [EW01].