 The foundations of UFO and OntoUML can be traced back to Giancarlo Guizzardi's Ph.D. thesis ""Ontological foundations for structural conceptual models"".In his work, he proposed a novel foundational ontology for conceptual modeling (UFO) and employed it to evaluate and re-design a fragment of the UML 2.0 metamodel for the purposes of conceptual modeling and domain ontology engineering.OntoUML has been adopted by many academic, corporate and governmental institutions worldwide for the development of conceptual models in a variety of domains.