This paper presents an empirical study that investigates the extent to which the pragmatic quality of ontology-driven models is influenced by the choice of a particular ontology, given a certain understanding of that ontology. To this end, we analyzed previous research efforts and distilled three hypotheses based on different metaphysical characteristics. An experiment based on two foundational ontologies (UFO and BORO) involving 158 participants was then carried out, followed by a protocol analysis to gain further insights into the results of experiment. We then extracted five derivations from the results of the empirical study in order to summarize our findings. Overall, the results confirm that the choice of a foundational ontology can lead to significant differences in the interpretation and comprehension of the conceptual models produced. Moreover, the effect of applying a certain foundational ontology can cause considerable variations in the effort required to comprehend these models.

本文提供了一项实证研究，调查了特定本体论的选择对给定本体论的模型的语用质量的影响程度，前提是对本体论有一定的了解。为此，我们分析了先前的研究成果，并根据不同的形而上学特征提炼出三个假设。然后进行了基于两种基本本体（UFO和BORO）的实验，涉及158名参与者，随后进行了协议分析，以进一步了解实验结果。然后，我们从实证研究的结果中提取了五个推导，以总结我们的发现。总体而言，结果证实，基础本体的选择会导致对所产生的概念模型的解释和理解上的显着差异。