Abstract
The evaluation of modeling processes for years has focused on assessing the outcome of modeling, while the process of modeling itself hardly has been subject of examination. Only in recent years, with rising interest in collaborative conceptual modeling approaches, the process of modeling has gained more attention. Different streams of research have focused on examining the sequence of model manipulations or have considered the collaborative modeling to be a negotiation process and shaped evaluation criteria accordingly. This article proposes to add the perspective of articulation and alignment of the topic of modeling to the potential foci of evaluation. Its contribution is to show, how existing research originating in theories of co-construction of knowledge can be adapted for this purpose and how the adopted perspective is complementary to those already available in related work. A comparative field study applying different evaluation methods on a single real world showcase is presented to show the practical applicability of the approach and allows to identify potential for the combination of previously unrelated analytical dimensions.
Highlights
Examining the process of conceptual modeling is an area of research that has gained momentum in the last years (Claes et al 2013; Soffer et al 2012)
While the authors demonstrate the applicability of their approach for the area of process modeling, it can be generalized for analyzing conceptual modeling processes in general
Current approaches focus on examining observable modeling activities or negotiation processes that show how actors agree on how to build a model
Summary
Examining the process of conceptual modeling is an area of research that has gained momentum in the last years (Claes et al 2013; Soffer et al 2012). It has been deployed in several research efforts in the area of social-technical systems modeling (Herrmann et al 2000) Approaches following this strategy, usually have adopted measures related to the generated outcome to assess their impact and hardly have evaluated the process of modeling itself. The paper reviews those approaches regarding the information that can be drawn from their results for assessing modeling techniques and identifies a gap in the current state-ofthe-art It introduces an evaluation approach, which investigates the process of collaborative modeling from a knowledge articulation and alignment perspective. This approach is reflected against existing approaches by applying them on a real world case and assessing the qualities of the different outcomes. The article closes with the discussion of the implications of these findings and an account on the steps towards a comprehensive evaluation framework for collaborative modeling processes
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