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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 proposed security-related constructs in ArchiMate with regard to the necessities of enterprise security modeling. Our analysis relies on a well-founded reference ontology of security to uncover ambiguity, missing modeling elements, and other deficiencies of the security modeling capabilities in ArchiMate. Based on this ontologically-founded analysis, we propose a redesign of security aspects of ArchiMate to overcome its original limitations.

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 and reason with their content. In other words, these models need to be cognitively tractable. This paper contributes to this goal by proposing a model clustering technique that leverages on the rich semantics of ontology-driven conceptual models (ODCM). In particular, we propose a formal notion of Relational Context to guide the automated clusterization (or modular breakdown) of conceptual models. Such Relational Contexts capture all the information needed for understanding entities "qua players of roles" in the scope of an objectified (reified) relationship (relator). The paper also presents computational support for automating the identification of Relational Contexts and this modular breakdown procedure. Finally, we report the results of an empirical study assessing the cognitive effectiveness of this approach.

The Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) has been used to provide foundations for the major conceptual modeling constructs. So far, UFO has reflected a view in which domain entities are fundamentally divided into those that collect invariants of the domain (i.e., types) and those entities that manifest those invariants (i.e., instances), following the conventional two-level classification scheme. This paper extends UFO with support for multi-level classification schemes, in which some entities accumulate both type-like and instance-like characteristics. This requires an ontological interpretation and a formal theory of types of types. This theory is employed to engineer new constructs and constraints into the OntoUML language, and to develop computational support for the formal verification of constraint violation over multi-level conceptual models.

Enterprise Modeling is far from its maximum potential. An important reason is that opposing stakeholder concerns lead to the existence of context-dependent models that are not mutually related, resulting in an inconsistent enterprise model landscape. This causes problems regarding unsustainable model utilization, since models are not used across different focal areas and over a longer period of time. The aim of our research project is to increase the value of Enterprise Modeling by creating a design method to support users in designing practically applicable models and a model integration method to integrate locally created models into an overarching enterprise model landscape that maintains model consistency.

A sharing platform is a digital platform that facilitates access to underutilized goods by renting or lending them to others. Users become less dependent on ownership which improves efficiency, sustainability, and the sense of community. The Sharing Economy (SE) is considered a complex domain because value co-creation can occur between multiple types of platform users. Developing platform software that offers the right functionality for the intended digital platform is therefore challenging. To address this complexity, an ontology can be utilized, which is an explicit specification of a conceptualization that provides a controlled vocabulary and shared meaning regarding a domain. The use of a sharing platform ontology allows for more effective communication and knowledge sharing amongst stakeholders in platform development and eventually drives the platform software development process. However, currently, it is not known how to develop such an ontology. In previous research, we developed the Digital Platform Ontology (DPO) and an extension of the DPO for describing platform business model choices. The DPO describes the digital platform domain in terms of digital platform types, including sharing platforms. However, a method to use the DPO and its business model extension for developing an organization-specific ontology that describes the functionality and business model of a specific existing or intended sharing platform was lacking. In this paper, we develop such a method using the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) and demonstrate it using a proof-of-concept based on the BlaBlaCar and Couchsurfing platforms.

In this paper a method is proposed for agile digital platform prototype development based on organization-specific ontologies. The resulting prototypes act as minimum viable product of the digital platform that is described by the ontologies. Our method combines the strengths of agile practices, to speed up the development process in a user-oriented manner, with the strengths of ontology-driven development, improving the software structure, single terminology, and communication between stakeholders. The method is demonstrated for the development of the android application ‘SafaRide’, a digital marketplace for safari ride sharing.

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 lack of precise methodological support for users when choosing the best way to model general terms representing types that appear in a domain, and for building sound taxonomic structures involving them. For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) - aimed at providing foundations for all major conceptual modeling constructs. At the core of this enterprise, there has been a theory of types specially designed to address these issues. This theory is ontologically well-founded, psychologically informed, and formally characterized. These results have led to the development of a Conceptual Modelling language dubbed OntoUML, reflecting the ontological micro-theories comprising UFO. Over the years, UFO and OntoUML have been successfully employed on conceptual model design in a variety of domains including academic, industrial, and governmental settings. These experiences exposed improvement opportunities for both the OntoUML language and its underlying theory, UFO. In this paper, we revise the theory of types in UFO in response to empirical evidence. The new version of this theory shows that many of OntoUML’s meta-types (e.g. kind, role, phase, mixin) should be considered not as restricted to substantial types but instead should be applied to model endurant types in general, including relator types, quality types, and mode types. We also contribute with a formal characterization of this fragment of the theory, which is then used to advance a new metamodel for OntoUML (termed OntoUML 2). To demonstrate that the benefits of this approach are extended beyond OntoUML, the proposed formal theory is then employed to support the definition of UFO-based lightweight Semantic Web ontologies with ontological constraint checking in OWL. Additionally, we report on empirical evidence from the literature, mainly from cognitive psychology but also from linguistics, supporting some of the key claims made by this theory. Finally, we propose a computational support for this updated metamodel.

Recently the sharing economy has emerged as a viable alternative to fulfilling a variety of consumer needs. As there is no consensus on the definition of ‘sharing economy’ we use the term ‘marketplace’ to refer more specifically to Internet/software-based sharing economy platforms connecting two different market segments. In the field of sharing economy and marketplaces we found a research gap concerning the (socio)technological aspects and the development of marketplaces. A marketplace ontology can help to have a clear account of marketplace concepts which will facilitate communication, consensus and alignment. In this paper we design this marketplace ontology in four steps. First the selection of UFO as foundation and UFO-S as core ontology. Second the search for a set of minimal conditions and properties common for marketplaces and the derivation into competency questions. Third, use the competency questions to identify fragmented sub-ontology pieces called Domain-Related Ontology Patterns (DROPs) and apply them informally by extending UFO-S concepts to design a marketplace domain ontology. This marketplace domain ontology is represented in OntoUML. The last step is the validation of the OntoUML model using expert knowledge.

International audience; Digital technologies in support of digitalization allows organizations to improve their strategic and operational performance, but also harbors risks of security, oversizing or loss of control, among others. While the management of these risks is essential to promote the success of digital transformation, no research offers an integrative framework to help monitor them. This study adopts a design science approach to conceive a maturity model evaluating the risks of using digital technologies. This framework is the initial step towards the supervision of these digital risks to succeed in digital transformation. We relied on an in-depth literature review and an empirical study using a Delphi approach and a focus group with 19 practitioners. Accordingly, we identify three dimensions of risks related to data, stakeholders and technology governance and distinguish them according to each digital technology in the spectrum of SMAC and DARQ technologies. We additionally define a maturity scale to assess these risks and a protocol to implement the maturity model. The paper concludes with its theoretical and practical implications as well as a research agenda.

We propose an axiomatic ontological framework for informational templates based on former works on slot-mereology. Templates and their parts can be filled by information content entities, but can exist even if unfilled. Thus, we represent templates as slots that can themselves have slots, where the "slot of" relation between slots can be interpreted as a parthood relation. Some slots of a slot are mandatory and need to be filled for the parent slot to be filled, whereas others are optional and do not have this restriction. The structure of a filler is also described by slots of a different nature. We discuss how parthood between slots can be connected with parthood between their fillers.

We take initial steps towards a meticulous analysis of functions (including the so-called "use function") within a recently proposed, unifying dispositional framework for realizable entities in Basic Formal Ontology (BFO). Our approach to function is strikingly characterized by an ontology of "extrinsic dispositions", which are realizable entities outside the BFO category of disposition. This work helps to articulate multiple possible senses of the term "function" within BFO and to deepen the understanding of the present BFO dispositional theory of function.

International audience; Functional parthood is relevant to the modeling of material objects and their complex interrelationships. For instance, it will be valuable for representingvarious kinds of objects in multi-layered biological reality. In this paper we sketch out a project to develop a dispositional approach to functional parthood based on a dispositional account of functions and a theory of parthood between dispositions.

International audience; We develop an affordance-based approach to a subkind of roles, namely roles that have a causal component and that involve an agent and an environment. This approach is based on a previous dispositional ontology of affordances and effectivities. More specifically, such roles are analyzed as identical to mereological sums of affordances or effectivities when they are realized. We illustrate this theory on the example of the roles of addresser (analyzed as a sum of effectivities when they are realized) and addressee (analyzed as a sum of affordances when they are realized). We discuss the import of this analysis for the category of role in the upper ontology Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), and the relation between this approach and Loebe's tripartition of roles.