Within the scope of automated information systems an ontology can be used as a component of a system or as a reference. Such reference is a type of standard comparison employed to evaluate the ability of the model underlying the system to represent the world. The present article explores the latter application, discussing the usefulness of ontologies in conceptual modeling processes. We present modeling essentials and examples of ontologies used as references. Then, we propose a list of topics to perform an ontological evaluation of models from the point of view of modeling language, and describe a case study to test the feasibility of the proposal. We hope to contribute to the research that relates ontologies and conceptual modeling through empirical results.
Ontologies; Knowledge representation; Information systems; Conceptual models
