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Ontological Considerations About the Representation of Events and Endurants in Business Models

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Business Process Management (BPM 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9850))

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Abstract

Different disciplines have been established to deal with the representation of entities of different ontological natures: the business process modeling discipline focuses mostly on event-like entities, and, in contrast, the (structural) conceptual modeling discipline focuses mostly on object-like entities (known as endurants in the ontology literature). In this paper, we discuss the impact of the event vs. endurant divide for conceptual models, showing that a rich ontological account is required to bridge this divide. Accounting for the ontological differences in events and endurants as well as their relations can lead to a more comprehensive representation of business reality.

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Acknowledgements

This research is partially funded by the Brazilian Research Funding Agencies CNPq (grants # 311313/2014-0, 485368/2013-7, 312158/2015-7 and 461777/2014-2) and FAPES (# 69382549). The authors would like to thank Roel Wieringa, Alex Borgida and John Mylopoulos for comments and fruitful discussions on the topics of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Federal University of Espírito Santo, Vitória, Brazil

    Giancarlo Guizzardi & João Paulo A. Almeida

  2. ISTC-CNR Laboratory for Applied Ontology, Trento, Italy

    Giancarlo Guizzardi & Nicola Guarino

Authors
  1. Giancarlo Guizzardi
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  2. Nicola Guarino
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  3. João Paulo A. Almeida
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Giancarlo Guizzardi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Marcello La Rosa

  2. DFKI, Universität des Saarlandes DFKI, Saarbrücken, Saarland, Germany

    Peter Loos

  3. Universidad Politècnica de Valencia , Valencia, Spain

    Oscar Pastor

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Guizzardi, G., Guarino, N., Almeida, J.P.A. (2016). Ontological Considerations About the Representation of Events and Endurants in Business Models. In: La Rosa, M., Loos, P., Pastor, O. (eds) Business Process Management. BPM 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9850. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45348-4_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45348-4_2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-45347-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-45348-4

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