Towards Ontological Foundations for the Conceptual Modeling of Events

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the application of foundational ontologies, i.e., formal ontological theories in the philosophical sense, to provide a theoretically sound foundation for improving the theory and practice of conceptual modeling. In this paper, we present advances on our research on the ontological foundations of conceptual modeling by addressing the concept of events. We present a foundational ontology of events (termed UFO-B) together with its axiomatization in first-order logic. Moreover, we report on an implementation of UFO-B using the computational logic language Alloy, and discuss its consistency, validation and possible uses.