Formal ontology, patterns and Anti-Patterns for next-generation Conceptual Modeling

In his ACM Turing Award Lecture entitled “The Humble Programmer”, E. W. Dijkstra discusses the sheer complexity one has to deal with when programming large computer systems. His article represented an open call for an acknowledgement of the complexity at hand and for the need of more sophisticated techniques to master this complexity. This talk advocates the view that we are now in an analogous situation with respect to Conceptual Modeling. We will experience an increasing demand for building Reference Conceptual Models in subject domains in reality, as well as employing them to address classes of problems, for which sophisticated ontological distinctions are demanded.