Ontological foundations for structural conceptual models

The main objective of this thesis is to contribute to the theory of Conceptual Modeling by proposing ontological foundations for structural conceptual models. Conceptual Modeling is a discipline of great importance to several areas in Computer Science. Its main objective is concerned with identifying, analyzing and describing the essential concepts and constraints of a universe of discourse, with the help of a (diagrammatic) modeling language that is based on a set of basic modeling concepts (forming a metamodel). In this thesis, we show how conceptual modeling languages can be evaluated and (re)designed with the purpose of improving their ontological adequacy. In simple terms, ontological adequacy is a…