Class Name Capitalization?

In another posting I mentioned the convention for capitalizing class names. I've been looking into this more deeply today, and I'm even more puzzled about how we got to where we are than I was when I started!

The convention I've seen the most is UpperCamelCase, which I've seen in object-oriented programming languages, OWL, RDFS, and XML. Where did this convention come from, especially the distinction between UpperCamelCase for class names and lowerCamelCase for properties?

When I model for an audience of business people, I make the names non-technical because they seem to find anything that smells of technology offensive. To make the names non-technical, I use spaces between the words, title case for the words themselves, and I spell out acronyms that would be unfamiliar to a layman. I rely on transformations to convert those names into CamelCase for technical language parsers.

Still, why do people expect to see UpperCamelCase in computer languages or Title Case in normal English for concepts? One answer I can conjure is that it is useful in English sentences. It signals to the reader that I'm being specific when I capitalize Association End, for example, because it makes it clear that I'm talking about the UML meta-class called AssociationEnd rather than the more general idea of the end of an association, which might include a name, multiplicity, stereotype, and a constraint.

Why are the capitalization rules for conceptual models different from an encyclopedia such as Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica? Wikipedia naming conventions are more or less sentence case, although Wikipedia acknowledges that "Outside of Wikipedia, and within certain specific fields (such as medicine), the usage of all-capital terms may be a proper way to feature new or important items." The Encyclopedia Britannica convention seems to only capitalize proper nouns, as in the example computer programming language. If we were to follow these encyclopedia capitalization rules, proper nouns would only apply to instances (except for cases where a class name contains a proper noun, as in "Epstein-Barr virus"). Do we have the capitalization conventions backwards for classes and instances in an ontology / conceptual model?

One reason may be what the Wikipedia article on capitalization says: "Common nouns may be capitalized when used as names for the entire class of such things, e.g. what a piece of work is Man." This makes me think maybe we're on the right track. However, The Open Biomedical Ontologies Foundry naming wiki page disagrees! It recommends: "Don’t enforce dogmatically, but prefer lower case beginnings for class and property names. Capture names just as they would appear in normal English written text, i.e. where acronyms and proper nouns cannot be avoided in names they should be capitalized." For example, they say to "Use ‘microarray’, ‘DNA microarray’, ‘pH value’, ‘Golgi apparatus’."

So, what is the right way to capitalize concept names in an ontology / conceptual model? In the world of RDFS and OWL, the convention seems to be that the first letter is always capitalized. I think what is important is consistency, but I do question the convention.

Can anyone shed some light on this?