Representing Collectives and Their Members in UML Conceptual Models: An Ontological Analysis

In a series of publications, we have employed ontological theories and principles to evaluate and improve the quality of conceptual modeling grammars and models. In this article, we continue this work by conducting an ontological analysis to investigate the proper representation of types whose instances are collectives, as well as the representation of a specific part-whole relation involving them, namely, the member-collective relation. As a result, we provide an ontological interpretation for these notions, as well as modeling guidelines for their sound representation in conceptual modeling.

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