Grounding for Ontological Architecture Quality:

Metaphysical Choices

Information systems (IS) are getting larger and more complex, becoming ‘gargantuan’. IS practices have not evolved in step to handle the development and maintenance of these gargantuan systems, leading to a variety of quality issues. The community recognises that they need to develop an appropriate organising architecture and are making significant efforts. Examples include the System Engineering Modeling Language (SysML), the Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) and 4+1 Architectural Blueprints. Most of these follow IEEE 1471-2000’s recommendation to use view models. We believe that these efforts are missing a key component – an information grounding view. In this paper, we firstly describe this view. Then we suggest a way to provide an architecture for it – foundational ontologies – and a way of assessing them – metaphysical choices. We illustrate how the metaphysical choices are made and how this can affect information modelling.