An Exploratory Analysis on the Comprehension of 3D and 4D Ontology-Driven Conceptual Models

In this paper, we perform an exploratory analysis to investigate the impact of adopting a 3D and a 4D foundational ontology on the quality of a conceptual model. More specifically, we determine the impact of the metaphysical characteristics of an ontology on the comprehension and understandability of the ontology-driven models by its users. The contributions of this research are: (1) while much effort in ODCM has been devoted into the syntactic and semantic aspects of models for improving their overall quality, this research focuses on the pragmatic aspect of a model; and (2) since little empirical research has yet been performed in this area, we formulated several hypotheses that are derived from the results and observations from our exploratory analysis. These hypotheses can then serve as a testing ground for future empirical research in order to investigate the fundamental differences between 3D and 4D ontology-driven models.

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