Lukyanenko Roman, Storey Veda C, Pastor Oscar
HEC Montreal, Montreal, Canada.
Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia USA.
Softw Syst Model. 2021;20(4):921-938. doi: 10.1007/s10270-021-00862-5. Epub 2021 Jan 18.
General ontology is a prominent theoretical foundation for information technology analysis, design, and development. Ontology is a branch of philosophy which studies what exists in reality. A widely used ontology in information systems, especially for conceptual modeling, is the BWW (Bunge-Wand-Weber), which is based on ideas of the philosopher and physicist Mario Bunge, as synthesized by Wand and Weber. The ontology was founded on an early subset of Bunge's philosophy; however, many of Bunge's ideas have evolved since then. An important question, therefore, is: do the more recent ideas expressed by Bunge call for a new ontology? In this paper, we conduct an analysis of Bunge's earlier and more recent works to address this question. We present a new ontology based on Bunge's later and broader works, which we refer to as . We then compare BSO to the constructs of BWW. The comparison reveals both considerable overlap between BSO and BWW, as well as substantial differences. From this comparison and the initial exposition of BSO, we provide suggestions for further ontology studies and identify research questions that could provide a fruitful agenda for future scholarship in conceptual modeling and other areas of information technology.
通用本体论是信息技术分析、设计和开发的重要理论基础。本体论是哲学的一个分支，研究现实中存在的事物。信息系统中广泛使用的一种本体论，特别是用于概念建模的，是BWW（邦奇-万德-韦伯）本体论，它基于哲学家兼物理学家马里奥·邦奇的思想，并由万德和韦伯进行了综合。该本体论建立在邦奇哲学的早期子集之上；然而，自那时以来，邦奇的许多思想已经有所发展。因此，一个重要的问题是：邦奇最近表达的思想是否需要一种新的本体论？在本文中，我们对邦奇的早期和近期作品进行分析，以解决这个问题。我们基于邦奇后期更广泛的作品提出了一种新的本体论，我们将其称为。然后我们将BSO与BWW的结构进行比较。比较结果显示，BSO与BWW之间既有相当大的重叠，也有显著的差异。基于这种比较以及对BSO的初步阐述，我们为进一步的本体论研究提供建议，并确定一些研究问题，这些问题可为概念建模和信息技术其他领域的未来学术研究提供一个富有成果的议程。
