Ontological Considerations About the Representation of Events and Endurants in Business Models

Different disciplines have been established to deal with the representation of entities of different ontological natures: the business process modeling discipline focuses mostly on event-like entities, and, in contrast, the (structural) conceptual modeling discipline focuses mostly on object-like entities (known as endurants in the ontology literature). In this paper, we discuss the impact of the event vs. endurant divide for conceptual models, showing that a rich ontological account is required to bridge this divide. Accounting for the ontological differences in events and endurants as well as their relations can lead to a more comprehensive representation of business reality.