On the Foundations of UML as an Ontology Representation Language

There is a growing interest in the use of UML class diagrams as a modeling language to represent domain ontologies. In a series of papers [1,2] we have been using the General Ontological Language (GOL) and its underly-ing foundational ontology, proposed in [3,4], to evaluate the ontological correctness of a conceptual UML class model and to develop guidelines for how the constructs of the UML should be used in conceptual modeling and ontology representation. This paper can be seen as a continuation of this work, in which we focus on analyzing the UML metaconcepts of classes, attributes, data types and associations from an ontological point of view