Types are fundamental for conceptual modeling and knowledge representation, being an essential construct in all major modeling languages in these fields. Despite that, from an ontological and cognitive point of view, there has been a lack of theoretical support for precisely defining a consensual view on types. As a consequence, there has been a lack of precise methodological support for users when choosing the best way to model general terms representing types that appear in a domain, and for building sound taxonomic structures involving them. For over a decade now, a community of researchers has contributed to the development of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) - aimed at providing foundations for all major conceptual modeling constructs. At the core of this enterprise, there has been a theory of types specially designed to address these issues. This theory is ontologically well-founded, psychologically informed, and formally characterized. These results have led to the development of a Conceptual Modelling language dubbed OntoUML, reflecting the ontological micro-theories comprising UFO. Over the years, UFO and OntoUML have been successfully employed on conceptual model design in a variety of domains including academic, industrial, and governmental settings. These experiences exposed improvement opportunities for both the OntoUML language and its underlying theory, UFO. In this paper, we revise the theory of types in UFO in response to empirical evidence. The new version of this theory shows that many of OntoUML’s meta-types (e.g. kind, role, phase, mixin) should be considered not as restricted to substantial types but instead should be applied to model endurant types in general, including relator types, quality types, and mode types. We also contribute with a formal characterization of this fragment of the theory, which is then used to advance a new metamodel for OntoUML (termed OntoUML 2). To demonstrate that the benefits of this approach are extended beyond OntoUML, the proposed formal theory is then employed to support the definition of UFO-based lightweight Semantic Web ontologies with ontological constraint checking in OWL. Additionally, we report on empirical evidence from the literature, mainly from cognitive psychology but also from linguistics, supporting some of the key claims made by this theory. Finally, we propose a computational support for this updated metamodel.

类型是概念建模和知识表示的基础，是这些领域所有主要建模语言的基本结构。尽管如此，从本体论和认知的角度来看，仍然缺乏理论上的支持来精确定义关于类型的共识性观点。因此，在选择对表示域中出现的类型的通用术语建模的最佳方式以及构建涉及它们的合理分类结构时，用户缺乏精确的方法论支持。十多年来，研究人员社区为统一基础本体 (UFO) 的发展做出了贡献 - 旨在为所有主要概念建模构造提供基础。在这家企业的核心，有一种专门设计用于解决这些问题的类型理论。这个理论在本体论上是有根据的，在心理上有充分的信息，并且有正式的特征。这些结果导致了被称为 OntoUML 的概念建模语言的发展，反映了构成 UFO 的本体微观理论。多年来，UFO 和 OntoUML 已成功应用于各种领域的概念模型设计，包括学术、工业和政府环境。这些经验为 OntoUML 语言及其基础理论 UFO 提供了改进机会。在本文中，我们根据经验证据修改了 UFO 中的类型理论。该理论的新版本表明 OntoUML 的许多元类型（例如种类、角色、阶段、mixin) 不应被视为仅限于实体类型，而应应用于一般的模型持久类型，包括相关类型、质量类型和模式类型。我们还对该理论的这个片段进行了正式的表征，然后将其用于推进 OntoUML 的新元模型（称为 OntoUML 2）。为了证明这种方法的好处超出了 OntoUML，提出的形式理论被用来支持基于 UFO 的轻量级语义 Web 本体的定义，并在 OWL 中进行本体约束检查。此外，我们报告了来自文献的经验证据，主要来自认知心理学，也来自语言学，支持该理论提出的一些关键主张。最后，我们为这个更新的元模型提出了计算支持。