João Paulo A. Almeida

Federal University of Espírito Santo | UFES · Departamento de Informática

There are a number of standards aiming to facilitate the exchange of competence data in the educational and job market areas. Despite their relevance, we have observed that they could benefit from an in-depth analysis of the notion of competence, given its central role in the intended application areas. This includes addressing facets of competence...

Diagrammatic and textual languages differ significantly with respect to the experience they offer to language users. While diagrammatic languages leverage visual variables to improve communication and problem solving, textual languages facilitate significantly a number of tasks including version control, model editing, model merging, parsing, etc....

In recent years, Brazil’s federal judicial system has embraced digitalization, making a large amount of legal process information available to citizens and legal experts. Despite the advances, a significant portion of the data produced and stored in legal systems presents itself in the form of natural language text, including numerous petitions and...

In order to support capability management, the field of Enterprise Architecture proposes methods and notations to model enterprises and their capabilities. ArchiMate is one of such notations and includes constructs to support capability mapping and other capability management tasks. However, the notation lacks some fine grained distinctions which a...

In the last decades, Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) has received significant attention, leading to standards such as SysML. SysML is due to a recent and radical update, breaking the dependence of its specification from UML, and leading to the development of two languages: KerML, which provides a top layer of general constructs, and SysML v2...

Several efforts that leverage the tools of formal on-tology have demonstrated the fruitfulness of considering key metaproperties of classes in ontol-ogy engineering. Despite that, it is still a common practice to apply representation schemes and approaches-such as OWL-that do not benefit from identifying ontological categories and simply treat all...

The distinction between types and individuals is key to most conceptual modeling techniques and knowledge representation languages. Despite that, there are a number of situations in which modelers navigate this distinction inadequately, leading to problematic models. We show evidence of a large number of representation mistakes associated with the...

Competence-based approaches have received increased attention, as the demand for qualified people with the right combination of competences establishes itself as a major factor of organizational performance. This paper examines how competences can be incorporated into Enterprise Architecture modeling: (i) we identify a key set of competence-related...

There are a number of standards aiming to facilitate the exchange of competence data in the educational and job market areas. Despite their relevance, we have observed that they could benefit from an in-depth analysis of the notion of competence, given its central role in the intended application areas. This includes addressing facets of competence...

Several efforts that leverage the tools of formal ontology (such as OntoClean, OntoUML, and UFO) have demonstrated the fruitfulness of considering key metaproperties of classes in ontology engineering. These metaproperties include sortality, rigidity, and external dependence, and give rise to many fine-grained ontological categories for classes, in...

To properly understand organizational adaptation and innovation, it is critical to understand the emergence phenomenon, i.e., how the capabilities of a system emerge after changes. However, for this, we should be able to explain systems, their structure, behavior, and capabilities. In pursuit of an understanding of the emergence phenomenon and the...

Understanding and modeling system behavior is a key aspect of many disciplines, and is crucial when systems are designed to manifest desirable behaviors. In order to grasp system behavior, it is inevitable to address how it emerges from the properties and behaviors of interrelated system components. In pursuit of an understanding of the emergence p...

To properly understand organizational adaptation and innovation, it is critical to understand the emergence phenomenon, i.e., how the capabilities of a system emerge after changes. However, for this, we should be able to explain systems, their structure, behavior, and capabilities. In pursuit of an understanding of the emergence phenomenon and the...

Organizations have adopted Continuous Software Engineering (CSE) practices aiming at making software development faster, iterative, integrated, continuous, and aligned with the business. In this context, they often use different applications (e.g., project management tools, source repositories, and quality assessment tools) that store valuable data...

Background: On November 5, 2015, the Fundão Dam, owned by Samarco Mineração SA, experienced a catastrophic failure, releasing approximately 55 to 62 million m3 of mining ore waste into the Doce River. This event had severe consequences as the Doce River serves as a vital source of water and food for numerous communities. Objective: Evaluate the spa...

Several efforts that leverage the tools of formal ontology (such as OntoClean, OntoUML, and UFO) have demonstrated the fruitfulness of considering key metaproperties of classes in ontology engineering. These metaproperties include sortality, rigidity, and external dependence, and give rise to many fine-grained ontological categories for classes, in...

Contracts usually have clauses that enable contracted parties to adjust their contractual positions in time, e.g., to relieve another party from duty or to grant new permission. This is especially important in long-running service relations, which require contracts to be adjusted to accommodate new or unforeseen circumstances. Despite that, the rep...

Organizations must pay close attention to human resource development in order to be successful. Because of this, competence-based approaches have received increased attention, as the demand for qualified people with the right combination of competences establishes itself as a major factor of organizational performance. This paper examines how compe...

Forward engineering relational schemas based on conceptual models (in languages such as UML and ER) is an established practice, with several automated transformation approaches discussed in the literature and implemented in production tools. These transformations must bridge the gap between the primitives offered by conceptual modeling languages on...

In this paper, we explore conceptual modeling as a means to improve the explicit representation of key aspects of a legal procedure. We employ in tandem an ontology-based structural conceptual model and a behavioral process model as complementary views on a legal subject matter. We examine as a case a specific type of appeal in the Brazilian legal...

Enterprise Risk Management and security have become a fundamental part of Enterprise Architecture, so several frameworks and modeling languages have been designed to support the activities associated with these areas. ArchiMate’s Risk and Security Overlay is one of such proposals, endorsed by The Open Group. We investigate the capabilities of the p...

The development of dependable information systems in legal contexts requires a precise understanding of the subtleties of the underlying legal phenomena. According to a modern understanding in philosophy of law, much of these phenomena are relational in nature. In this paper, we employ a theoretically well-grounded legal core ontology (UFO-L) to co...

Taxonomies play a central role in conceptual domain modeling, having a direct impact in areas such as knowledge representation, ontology engineering, and software engineering, as well as knowledge organization in information sciences. Despite this, there is little guidance on how to build high-quality taxonomies, with notable exceptions being the O...

The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) was developed over the last two decades by consistently putting together theories from areas such as formal ontology in philosophy, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophical logics. It comprises a number of micro-theories addressing fundamental conceptual modeling notions, including entity types and r...

The distinction between types and individuals is key to most conceptual modeling techniques. Despite that, there are a number of situations in which modelers navigate this distinction inadequately, leading to problematic models. We show evidence of a large number of modeling mistakes associated with the failure to employ this distinction in the Wik...

Forward engineering relational schemas based on conceptual models is an established practice, with a number of commercial tools available and widely used in production settings. These tools employ automated transformation strategies to address the gap between the primitives offered by conceptual modeling languages (such as ER and UML) and the relat...

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of reference conceptual models to capture information about complex and sensitive business domains (e.g., finance, healthcare, space). These models play a fundamental role in different types of critical semantic interoperability tasks. Therefore, domain experts must be able to understand...

In the past decades, the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) has played an important role in supporting the development of ontologies in academic and business settings, being employed to represent widely diverse domains. In this period, a dedicated community of researchers has worked to support UFO and its representation language, OntoUML, by creat...

Forward engineering relational schemas based on conceptual models is an established practice, with a number of commercial tools available and widely used in production settings. These tools employ automated transformation strategies to address the gap between the primitives offered by conceptual modeling languages (such as ER and UML) and the relat...

The distinction between types and individuals is key to most conceptual modeling techniques. Despite that, there are a number of situations in which modelers navigate this distinction inadequately, leading to problematic models. We show evidence of a large number of modeling mistakes associated with the failure to employ this distinction in the Wik...

At the core of Hohfeld's contribution to legal theory is a conceptual framework for the analysis of the legal positions occupied by agents in intersubjective legal relations. Hohfeld presented a system of eight "fundamental" concepts relying on notions of * Our thanks to David Pardo, Lauro César Araujo, and Flávio Roberto de Almeida Heringer for th...

Taxonomies play a central role in conceptual domain modeling having a direct impact in areas such as knowledge representation, ontology engineering, software engineering, as well as in knowledge organization in information sciences. Despite their key role, there is in the literature little guidance on how to build high-quality taxonomies, with nota...

Types are fundamental for conceptual modeling and knowledge representation, being an essential construct in all major modeling languages in these fields. Despite that, from an ontological and cognitive point of view, there has been a lack of theoretical support for precisely defining a consensual view on types. As a consequence, there has been a la...

In many important subject domains, there are central real-world phenomena that span across multiple classification levels. In these subject domains, besides having the traditional type-level domain regularities (classes) that classify multiple concrete instances, we also have higher-order type-level regularities (metaclasses) that classify multiple...

Taxonomies play a central role in conceptual domain modeling having a direct impact in areas such as knowledge representation, ontology engineering, software engineering, as well as in knowledge organization in information sciences. Despite their key role, there is in the literature little guidance on how to build high-quality taxonomies, with nota...

Context : Organizations often use different applications to support the Scrum process, including project management tools, source repository and quality assessment tools. These applications store useful data for decision-making. However, data items often remain spread in different applications, each of which adopt different data and behavioral mode...

Trust is widely acknowledged as the cornerstone of relationships in social life. But what makes an agent trust a person, a resource or an organization? Which characteristics should a trustee have in order to be considered trustworthy? The importance of understanding trust in organizations has motivated us to investigate the representation of trust...

In the last two decades, about a dozen proposals were made to extend object-oriented modeling by multiple abstraction levels. One group of proposals designates explicit levels to objects and classes. The second group uses the powertype pattern to implicitly establish levels. From this group, we consider two proposals, DeepTelos and MLT*. Both have...

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the use of reference conceptual models to capture information about complex and sensitive business domains (e.g., finance, healthcare, space). These models play a fundamental role in different types of critical semantic interoperability tasks. Therefore, it is essential that domain experts are a...

Stability is a key quality of a conceptual model. A stable conceptual model is able to withstand changes in domain conceptualization and user requirements without major impact. This paper addresses stability of ontology-driven conceptual models by presenting a number of patterns in the OntoUML language which are derived from characteristics of the...

In this paper, we expose the legal theories underlying two important classes of Legal Core Ontologies and show how these ontologies inherit both limitations and benefits (such as explanatory power) of their underlying theories. We do that with the help of a real case study in which we have normative omission and collision of principles. We use this...

Despite the existence of several strategies for transforming structural conceptual models into relational schemas, there are a number of features of ontology-based conceptual models that have not been taken into account in the existing literature. Most approaches fail to support conceptual models that: (i) include overlapping or incomplete generali...

Despite the existence of several strategies for transforming structural conceptual models into relational schemas, there are a number of features of ontology-based conceptual models that have not been taken into account in the existing literature. Most approaches fail to support conceptual models that: (i) include overlapping or incomplete generali...

In this paper, we expose the legal theories underlying two important classes of Legal Core Ontologies and show how these ontologies inherit both limitations and benefits (such as explanatory power) of their underlying theories. We do that with the help of a real case study in which we have normative omission and collision of principles. We use this...

In this paper, we expose the legal theories underlying two important classes of Legal Core Ontologies and show how these ontologies inherit both limitations and benefits (such as explanatory power) of their underlying theories. We do that with the help of a real case study in which we have normative omission and collision of principles. We use this...

Successful data integration requires careful examination of data semantics, a task that has often been approached with the use of ontologies. However, there are some barriers to build ontologies for data integration in complex domains such as the environmental one. A relevant problem is the development of new ontologies disregarding previous knowle...

This paper is written in honour of Ricardo de Almeida Falbo, on the occasion of his formal retirement. Some aspects of his career are discussed from two complementary directions. The first direction concerns his contributions from the area of ontologies to software engineering-helping to shape what is now known as Ontology-Driven Software Engineeri...

The document is available at http://purl.org/nemo/gufo

The increasing volume and complexity of scientific research data associated with its semantic heterogeneity demands strategies to enable data integrated reuse. This is essential to improve global collaborations, in what has been called e-Science. A way to promote data integration is through the use of ontologies. Ontologies can play the role of a s...

Service contracts bind parties legally, regulating their behavior in the scope of a (business) service relationship. Given that there are legal consequences attached to service contracts, understanding the elements of a contract is key to managing services in an enterprise. After all, provisions in a service contract and in legislation establish ob...

For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the ontological foundations of Conceptual Modeling by participating to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and the UFO-based modeling language OntoUML, which have been successfully employed in a number of different sectors. The empirical feedback from these...

The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) has been used to provide foundations for the major conceptual modeling constructs. This ontology has led to the OntoUML Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling language, a UML class diagram profile reflecting the ontological micro-theories comprising UFO. So far, the focus of OntoUML has been on the representatio...

Conceptual models are often built with techniques that propose a strict stratification of entities into two classification levels: a level of types (or classes) and a level of instances. Multi-level conceptual modeling extends the conventional two-level scheme by admitting that types can be instances of other types, giving rise to multiple levels o...