TOWARDS A MORE RELATIONSHIP-FRIENDLY ONTOLOGY
FOUNDATION FOR CONCEPTUAL MODELLING
Roger Tagg
Independent Consultant, GPO Box 609, Magill SA 5072, Australia
Keywords: Conceptual Modelling, Ontologies, Relationships.
Abstract: Researchers have for some years been looking to the field of Ontology to provide a foundation structure of
meaning which would provide a yardstick against which different modelling systems and methodologies can
be evaluated. The Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology (BWW) has led the field in this endeavour, but since 2000
has undergone some criticism. A notable feature of BWW is that it does not treat relationships as first-class
objects. Several recent proposals have proposed ontologies that do emphasize relationships, although to a
somewhat limited extent. Based on previous work on a relationship-oriented ontology, this paper suggests
directions in which a Mark 2 BWW could be evolved.
1 INTRODUCTION
There have been a number of attempts to find a
common structure of meaning for the field of
Information Systems, to try and reduce confusion
when IT analysts, who might have been brought up
in different methodologies, have to work together,
especially on large projects. A standard ontology
would, researchers argue, be preferable to a Tower
of Babel of different meta-models and
methodologies.
The practice of Information Systems
Development seems inevitably dominated by rival
fashions, each with their own conceptual modelling
approaches. Examples are Database Orientation (e.g.
Entity-Relationship, Relational); Process Orientation
(e.g. BPR, ARIS, SAP, Workflow), Object
Orientation (e.g. UML); Web Services; Agile
Methods and so on. At the same time, a number of
good ideas that better address the wider socio-
technical scope of Information Systems have never
become widespread in IT practice, e.g. LAP
(Language Action Perspective), Organizational
Semiotics and Activity Theory.
One attempt to address the Tower of Babel
problem has been the idea of Model Driven
Architecture (MDA). This depends on having a
Platform Independent Architecture (PIA) based on
an extended form of UML (UML-Profile), together
with a series of transformations (ideally able to be
generated automatically) from the PIA to different
modelling architectures and ultimately to systems
built with specific software tools.
Other academics have argued the need to go back
to a more formal, philosophical and rigorously
defined ontology that shows a semantic structure of
all the things one needs to talk about when
developing information systems. As well as being
formal and rigorous, such a basis should not have
more concepts than are absolutely necessary.
Section 2 of this paper summarises some of the
recent attempts to build such a foundation, the major
example being the ontology known as Bunge-Wand-
Weber (BWW for short). Section 3 puts forwards a
brief justification for treating relationships as a more
central aspect of any architecture. Section 4
discusses how the specific relationship oriented
ontology FROLIO might contribute to an improved
foundation ontology. Finally, Section 5 offers some
concluding thoughts and ideas for future work.
2 RELATED WORK
2.1 The Bunge-Wand-Weber Ontology
(Wand and Weber 1990) developed the BWW
ontology on the basis of a more philosophical
ontology developed around 1977 by Mario Bunge.
BWW follows some of Bunge's original ideas, but
not all.
368
Tagg R. (2010).
TOWARDS A MORE RELATIONSHIP-FRIENDLY ONTOLOGY FOUNDATION FOR CONCEPTUAL MODELLING.
In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Information Systems Analysis and Specification, pages
368-373
DOI: 10.5220/0003018803680373
Copyright
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 SciTePress

The idea of BWW is to be used as a basis to evaluate
the “grammars” of the various conceptual IS
modelling methods such as those mentioned in the
introduction. It can, for example, be used to assess if
a methodology is missing certain essential concepts,
or if some of their concepts are redundant.
The main concepts (objects) included in BWW
are listed in Table 1.
Table 1: Main objects in the BWW ontology.
Thing
Property
- In General (alias attribute)
- In Particular (attribute value for an individual)
- Hereditary
- Emergent
- Intrinsic (of a single thing only, i.e. not "Mutual")
Class (things that have one property the same)
Kind (things that have 2 or more properties same)
Acts On
Coupling
- Binding Mutual Property
- Non-Binding Mutual Property
State
- Stable State
- Unstable State
Conceivable State
Space
State Law
- Stability Condition
- Corrective Action
Lawful State Space
Transformation
Lawful Transformation
- Stability Condition
- Corrective Action
Conceivable Event Space
Lawful Event Space
External Event
Internal Event
- Well-defined Event
- Poorly-Defined Event
History
System
- Subsystem
- System Decomposition
- Level Structure
System Composition
System Structure
System Environment
Relationships, such as they exist in BWW, are
represented either by Functions or by Mutual
Properties. The basic “relationship” functions are:
• A Thing possesses a Property
• A Property precedes another Property (in the
sense that possessing the first is a pre-condition
for possessing the second)
• An Event marks the change between State 1 and
State 2
• A Composite Property is a conjunction of
Property 1, Property 2 etc (e.g. Date is a
conjunction of Day, Month and Year)
• A Composite Thing is an association of Thing 1,
Thing 2 etc
• A Composite Event is a composition of Event 1,
Event 2 etc
There are a number of “supplementary functions”
which test if, for example, one of the individual
objects is part of a given Composite object, or a
member of a given Class or Kind.
Wand, Storey and Weber (1999) describes how
the BWW ontology addresses the concept of
relationships. It does not regard them as "first class
concepts", on the grounds that they are too imprecise
and vague in their semantics, and “reflect a design
and implementation view”.
Some researchers, e.g. (Rosemann and Green
2002, Kiwelekar and Joshi 2007) have proposed
“meta models” of the BWW ontology.
Criticisms of Bunge-Wand-Weber. Various
authors have commented that BWW - as presented -
is not intuitive for many of the people that might use
it. Others say that, while well oriented to
information systems, it does not appear to address
the more “soft” (i.e. less formal, more human-
oriented) areas of information systems. Critics point
out that Bunge's original ontology (or at least that
part of it which Wand and Weber built on) is very
restricted to the world of matter, being based on
dialectical materialism. It therefore tends to be light
on some important aspects in IS development, e.g.
Intention, Goal etc. It is also claimed that Wand and
Weber didn't use enough aspects of Bunge's
ontology, or they didn't use it as he intended.
(Allen and March 2006) say that Bunge's
ontology “has no place for human intentions,
interpretations or meaning”, or what (Searle 1995)
calls “institutional reality”, which includes
“corporations, government agencies, money,
educational institutions, contracts and transactions”.
They claim that BWW has no support for “rules,
policies and procedures”.
(Herrera et al 2005) point out that Bunge did
publish – admittedly in 1993 and after BWW
appeared - a Social ontology. They have proposed
extensions to BWW to take this on board, under the
name IOMIS.
(Rosemann and Green 2002) suggested that
BWW should be extended to cater for multiple
perspectives in IS conceptual modelling, particularly
the Process-centric perspective. They tested their
extensions on the Activity Based Costing component
of SAP, where concepts such as direct and indirect
costs, cost pools, cost allocation base and activity
were involved.
(Rosemann and Wyssusek 2005) suggested
revisiting Bunge's original ideas and adding back in
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Bunge's concept of “hierarchies of systems”, at the
bottom of which lies the Physical system, the top
level being the Socio-Technical system. Since BWW
already includes a hierarchy of System Composition
(see Table 1) this use of the word “hierarchy” seems
confusing – it might be better to talk about an
interconnected network of different spheres.
In 2006, a set of papers was published in the
Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems. To
begin with, (Wyssusek 2006) summarized a number
of criticisms of the BWW Ontology. Responses to
these criticisms, from Guarino & Guizzardi,
Krogstie, Lyytinen, Miller & Kazmierczak, Opdahl -
and Wand & Weber themselves – then follow,
together with an afterword from Wyssusek. In
Krogstie’s response, he points out that
Organizational Semiotics approaches, such as his
group’s SEQUAL, have also been used for assessing
the quality of modelling approaches, and that these
naturally incorporate a multi-level view, following
Stamper’s “semiotic ladder”.
2.2 Some other Active Ontology
Foundation Projects
A number of recent projects have taken a less
dismissive view of relationships, and have given
them more attention in their proposals.
GFO. Herre, Heller and colleagues in the Onto-
Med group in Leipzig, Germany have been
developing an ontology system for application in
medical informatics (Herre et al 2006). They started
with a proposal GOL intended for informatics and
data dictionaries, which has evolved into GFO -
General Foundational Ontology and GFO-Bio. It
recognizes a whole range of relationships types,
some of them with 3 rather than the usual 2 roles. In
some cases the third role is Context. GOL included
12 main relationship categories.
UFO. Guizzardi, who was a former collaborator
with the Onto-Med group above, proposed with
colleagues a family of ontologies (with
relationships) named UFO - Unified Foundational
Ontology (Guizzardi et al 2008, Guizzardi and
Wagner 2008). UFO-A covers similar ground to
BWW; while UFO-B addresses temporal
relationships and UFO-C social relationships.
Sheth’s Relationship Web.
Amit Sheth, formerly
of the LSDIS research group at the Univ of Georgia,
now leads a group named kno.e.sis at Wright State
University in Dayton, Ohio. (Sheth 2007) is a
keynote slide presentation describing his new
group’s research directions, which recognize the so-
called “Relationship Web”. The primary application
at kno.e.sis seems to be the automatic extraction of
relationships from material on the web.
Storey’s Relationship Ontology. Veda Storey (a
former colleague of Wand at UBC and contributor to
the 1999 BWW paper on relationships), together
with colleagues at Georgia State University, has
published papers about an Ontology for
Relationships, e.g. (Ullrich et al 2000, Storey 2005).
They have proposed 24 categories of relationships,
drawn from sources such as WordNet, including
common verb phrases (e.g. is, has, gets), data
abstractions and business processes.
3 JUSTIFICATION FOR MORE
DIRECT TREATMENT OF
RELATIONSHIPS
According to (Osborne 2006), Dogen, the Japanese
Zen master said, around 1250 AD, “Things do not
have a meaning in themselves, but only in relation to
other things”. Osborne comments: “For Westerners
obsessed with the classification of material things,
this is a truly radical idea”. This, in a nutshell, is the
basic justification for giving relationships higher
importance in foundation
onto-logies that are to be used as a basis or
yardstick for deciding if conceptual models,
languages or methods are complete or contain
redundancy. Wand and Weber’s argument that
relationships are a design-implementation construct
relies on seeing relationships only in the Chen
Entity-Relationship sense. In this paper,
relationships are seen, in the Zen sense, as more
fundamental to the universe of discourse – possibly
more fundamental than entities.
Further, if an ontology oriented to conceptual
modelling is to be applicable to systems beyond
those that deal with strictly material “bean-
counting”, then it needs to be able to capture more of
the meaning inherent in the wider socio-technical
environment. This implies the need to include
relationships covering intention, desire,
interpretation, representation and so on.
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Figure 1: Default roles in a FROLIO relationship.
4 A MORE
RELATIONSHIP-FRIENDLY
APPROACH
FROLIO (Formalizable Relationship-Oriented
Language Insensitive Ontology) was introduced in
(Tagg 2008). It was built up initially from a trawl
through Roget’s Thesaurus (Roget 1852 etc).
It treats relationships as N-ary by default, and
recognizes a number of common roles that appear in
many relationship types. This contrasts with most of
the ontologies mentioned in 2.2 above, where
relationships are usually binary - although
compound relationships are included in (Ullrich et al
2000).
In Figure 1 above, the four clasped hands
represent the relationship, and the sockets the
various roles. The A, B and C roles represent the
entities that are being primarily related, with G1, G2
etc representing further active roles if needed. In
simple binary relationships only A and B may
appear. The I role (Instrument) and M role (Method)
represent any tools or processes involved in creating
and maintaining the relationship. The N role is used
as a name for the relationship when it itself plays the
role of one of the entities in a further relationship.
The remaining “secondary” roles are P (Place)
and T (Time), each either with a single value or a
“From … To” pair; X (Context), i.e. the scope of
what we are talking about; Y (Theory), i.e. the
model of reality we are working with; and Z
(Authorship) i.e. the person or authority who is
asserting the relationship.
FROLIO currently encompasses 12 major
relationship categories, with 47 subcategories and
280 named relationship types. These show some
similarity with those in (Storey 2005).
Arrangement (56 relationship types) has 4 main
subcategories, dealing with Space, Time, Physical
Connection and Interpersonal, Organisational, or
Abstract Structures. Some relationship types are
Static by nature, others Dynamic.
Classification has just 3 relationship types,
instance-of, sub-class-of and shares some instances
with.
Distinguishing is concerned with difference
sameness and similarity, and has 17 relationship
types in 4 categories, Identity, Observable
Attributes, Space-Time and Instinct-Feeling- Logic.
Interaction (47 relationship types) has the 4 sub-
categories of Cooperation, Contention, Influence and
Speech Acts.
Logic (24 types) has the 6 sub-categories Deduction,
Explanation, Forethought, Insight/Induction,
Justification and Summarization.
Motivation has just 7 types in 3 sub-categories,
Direct Motivation, Goal Orientation and Indirect
Commitment; in the last case a Contract or other
commitment is intermediate between the human or
animal and a potential action.
Partitioning has just 2 sub-categories; the main one
is Composition, whereas the other covers
Membership (implying a collection of similar things
in a group). Part-hood in this sense covers abstract
things (e.g. sub-issues, factors, organization units) as
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well as physical parts as in an assembly or a
machine.
Representation (14 types) is split into 5 sub-
categories, Identification, Delegation, Expression
(e.g. articulation in language, translation,
paraphrase, spin), Notation (e.g. measurement,
recording) and Modelling (is-a-model-of).
Sensation (44 types) comes in 3 sub-categories,
Emotional, Observational (i.e. through one of the 5
senses) and Robotic Detection.
Transformation (26 types) covers the relationship
between things in a “before” state and an “after”
state. The 5 sub-categories in FROLIO are Creation
and Manufacture, Reproduction, Modification-
Metamorphosis, Destruction-Consu-mption and
Transfer.
Utility has one main sub-category, Usefulness, and 3
others, Substitute-Alternative, Opportunity and
Habit. There are currently 10 types in all.
Volition has 21 relationship types. One of the main
entities (A or B role) is always a state of affairs,
situation or scenario. The 4 sub-categories are
Desire, Intention, Constraint and Risk.
As currently documented, the roles appropriate
for each main category and sub-category are
identified, and examples of real-world relationships
offered.
However, as it exists today, FROLIO is only a
partial ontology, concentrating on relationships. It is
not complete on the four aspects of ontology
(Things, States, Transformations and Systems)
addressed by BWW (see Table 1). The intention has
up to now been that FROLIO would complement
practical ontologies that already exist, like SUMO
(Pease 2010) or OpenCyc (Cycorp 2010). In the
context of the conceptual “platform independent”
modelling of information systems, it would seem
possible for FROLIO to complement most of BWW,
or to enrich the already-proposed relationship-
friendly ontologies such as GFO, UFO or Storey’s.
It could possibly also complement the Ontology
Charts used with Stamper’s Semantic Analysis
Method (SAM), with their concepts of Affordances
and Norms (Cordeiro and Filipe 2005).
5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
5.1 Where Have we got to?
The BWW ontology has been available now for 20
years, and, according to several comments in
(Wyssusek 2006), has been put to some good use.
However some disquiet seems to be being expressed
from a variety of researchers, and more recent
projects (including that of Storey who was part of
some of the early BWW work) have moved to a
stance that treats relationships with more
importance.
However it is possible that some of these projects
have not yet taken on board some of the important
semantics of relationships, and of the underlying
philosophical nature of human activity, coloured as
it is by desire, purpose and emotion. It is in this
respect that consideration of the structure of
FROLIO might add value to current proposals.
A symptom of the current importance of the
issues addressed by this paper is the forthcoming
publication by Springer (scheduled for April 2010)
of a collection titled “Theory and Applications of
Ontology” (Poli et al 2010). There are two volumes:
“Philosophical Perspectives” and “Computer
Applications”. The latter includes contributions by
Herre, Guizzardi and Wagner, and the developers of
Cyc.
5.2 Future Work
The present author having recently retired, it is not
easy to predict how this work can continue. FROLIO
itself is continuing to be developed, but as a
platform for guiding individuals to examine the
models behind mass media, social and political
pronouncements, rather than the models of
Information Systems development.
A BWW Mark 2 might be a good direction in
which to go. The quality of the discussions on
Wyssusek’s criticisms in the 2006 ScanJIS issue
seems very high. The issue of whether or not the
current downplaying of relationships in BWW
should continue needs revisiting. More certainly, the
need to better recognize institutional and social
realities seems unquestionable.
This paper therefore suggests that a new
foundation ontology should be built on the efforts of
Guizzardi and his team. The relationship-specific
parts could usefully be enhanced by consideration of
FROLIO, Organizational Semiotics and the work of
Storey and her colleagues. The new ontology should
also take on board both Bunge’s social ontology and
domain-specific applications such as GFO-Bio.
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