Multi-domain model catalogs serve as empirical sources of knowledge and insights about specific domains, about the use of a modeling language’s constructs, as well as about the patterns and anti-patterns recurrent in the models of that language crosscutting different domains. They may support domain and language learning, model reuse, knowledge discovery for humans, and reliable automated processing and analysis if built following generally accepted quality requirements for scientific data management. More specifically, not unlike scientific (meta)data, models should be shared according to the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability). In this paper, we report on the construction of a FAIR model catalog for Ontology-Driven Conceptual Modeling research, a trending paradigm lying at the intersection of conceptual modeling and ontology engineering in which the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and OntoUML emerged among the most adopted technologies. The catalog, publicly available at https://w3id.org/ontouml-models, currently includes over one hundred and forty models, developed in a variety of contexts and domains.

In a model-driven design process the interaction between application parts can be described at various levels of platform-independence. At the lowest level of platform-independence, interaction is realized by interaction mechanisms provided by specific middleware platforms. At higher levels of platform-independence, interaction must be described in such a way that it can be further refined and realized onto a number of different middleware platforms, each with its particular interaction mechanisms and implementation constraints. In this paper, we investigate concepts that support interaction design at various levels of middleware-platform-independence. In addition, we propose design operations for interaction refinement. The application of these operations to source designs results in target designs that take into account implementation constraints imposed by platforms, while preserving characteristics prescribed in source designs. Target designs are related to source designs by conformance. We discuss how transformation and conformance can be related, such that transformations indeed preserve the characteristics prescribed by a source design.