Lupascian Non-Negativity Applied to Conceptual Modeling: Alternating Static Potentiality and Dynamic Actuality

In software engineering, conceptual modeling focuses on creating representations of the world that are as faithful and rich as possible, with the aim of guiding the development of software systems. In contrast, in the computing realm, the notion of ontology has been characterized as being closely related to conceptual modeling and is often viewed as a specification of a conceptualization. Accordingly, conceptual modeling and ontology engineering now address the same problem of representing the world in a suitable fashion. A high-level ontology provides a means to describe concepts and their interactions with each other and to capture structural and behavioral features in the intended domain. This paper aims to analyze ontological concepts and semantics of modeling notations to provide a common understanding among software engineers. An important issue in this context concerns the question of whether the modeled world might be stratified into ontological levels. We introduce an abstract system of two-level domain ontology to be used as a foundation for conceptual models. We study the two levels of staticity and dynamics in the context of the thinging machine (TM) model using the notions of potentiality and actuality that the Franco-Romanian philosopher Stephane Lupasco developed in logic. He provided a quasi-universal rejection of contradiction where every event was always associated with a no event, such that the actualization of an event entails the potentialization of a no event and vice versa without either ever disappearing completely. This approach is illustrated by re-modeling UML state machines in TM modeling. The results strengthen the semantics of a static versus dynamic levels in conceptual modeling and sharpen the notion of events as a phenomenon without negativity alternating between the two levels of dynamics and staticity.