Supporting Sound Multi-Level Modeling—Specification and Implementation of a Multi-Dimensional Modeling Approach

Multiple levels of classification naturally occur in many domains. Several multi-level modeling approaches account for this, and a subset of them attempt to provide their users with sanity-checking mechanisms in order to guard them against conceptually ill-formed models. Historically, the respective multi-level well-formedness schemes have either been overly restrictive or too lax. Orthogonal Ontological Classification has been proposed as a foundation for sound multi-level modeling that combines the selectivity of strict schemes with the flexibility afforded by laxer schemes. In this article, we present the second iteration of a formalization of Orthogonal Ontological Classification, which we empirically validated to demonstrate some of its hitherto only postulated claims using an implementation in ConceptBase . We discuss the expressiveness of the formal language used, ConceptBase ’s evaluation efficiency, and the usability of our realization based on a digital twin example model.