Conceptual Modeling Techniques Research Articles

Comparing conceptual modeling techniques

The empirical literature comparing entity relationship and object-oriented modeling techniques, while vibrant, has often yielded equivocal findings. This review employs Norman's (1986) Theory of Action to distinguish between model creation and comprehension studies, and applies and extends the theoretical framework proposed by Gemino and Wand (2004) to highlight and detail several issues that may need further exploration if consistent results in this stream are to be realized. Specifically, this paper explores why and how issues of ontological foundation, training, equivalence of conceptual models, and modeling practices may result in differences between alternative modeling techniques. A comprehensive picture of this literature is provided and a number of potential avenues for future research are proposed.

Modelling strategic actor relationships for risk management in organizations undergoing business process reengineering due to information systems adoption

PurposeBecause of the competitive economy, organizations today seek to rationalize, innovate and adapt to changing environments and circumstances as part of business process reengineering (BPR) efforts. Irrespective of the process reengineering program selected and the technique used to model it, BPR brings with it the issues of organizational and process changes. Thus, BPR initiatives involve risk taking. Effective management of risks and their prediction and estimation should help in minimizing failures from BPR efforts. Risk management is non‐trivial due to the large uncertainty involved with business success with BPR efforts. Though some attempt has been made to model risk management in enterprise information systems using conventional conceptual modelling techniques, the previous works have analyzed and modeled the same just by addressing “what” a process is like, but do not address “why” the process is the way it is.Design/methodology/approachThe approach presents a new technique for analyzing and modelling early‐phase requirements of organizational risk management that provides the motivations, intents, and rationales behind the entities and activities.FindingsA case study has been considered to illustrate this approach.Originality/valueThe approach is novel in the sense that there is no similar intentional modeling approach for risk management to the best of one's knowledge. The approach is expected to be valuable because by using this approach one can reason about the risks associated with BPR and can incorporate prominently the issues related to risk in the process of systems analysis and design.

An actor‐dependency technique for analyzing and modeling early‐phase requirements of organizational change management due to information systems adoption

PurposeBecause of the competitive economy, organizations today seek to rationalize, innovate and adapt to changing environments and circumstances as part of business process reengineering (BPR) efforts. Irrespective of the process reengineering program selected and the technique used to model it, BPR brings with it the issues of organizational and process changes, which involves managing organizational changes (also called “change management”). Change management is non‐trivial, as organizational changes are difficult to accomplish. Though some attempt has been made to model change management in enterprise information systems using conventional conceptual modeling techniques, they have just addressed “what” a change process is like, and they do not address “why” the process is the way it is.Design/methodology/approachThe approach presents an actor‐dependency‐based technique for analyzing and modeling early‐phase requirements of organizational change management that provides the motivations, intents, and rationales behind the entities and activities.FindingsA case study illustrates this approach.Originality/valueThis approach is novel in the sense that there is no similar intentional modeling approach for change management to the best of our knowledge. The approach is expected to be valuable because using this approach one can reason about the opportunities and changes that are associated with BPR and can incorporate prominently the issues related to change in the process of system analysis and design.

What do the pictures mean? Guidelines for experimental evaluation of representation fidelity in diagrammatical conceptual modeling techniques

It is important to articulate the objectives and underlying assumptions behind a growing body of experimental research in conceptual modeling. We provide four guidelines for developing materials for experiments that evaluate conceptual modeling techniques, under the assumption that a primary purpose of conceptual modeling is to facilitate communication between analysts and users in validating domain knowledge during systems development. These guidelines assist in developing experimental materials that support meaningful tests of domain semantics. We present empirical evidence indicating the value of two of the guidelines. We also evaluate selected recent experiments on conceptual modeling with respect to the guidelines.

A framework for empirical evaluation of conceptual modeling techniques

The paper presents a framework for the empirical evaluation of conceptual modeling techniques used in requirements engineering. The framework is based on the notion that modeling techniques should be compared via their underlying grammars. The framework identifies two types of dimensions in empirical comparisons--affecting and affected dimensions. The affecting dimensions provide guidance for task definition, independent variables and controls, while the affected dimensions define the possible mediating variables and dependent variables. In particular, the framework addresses the dependence between the modeling task--model creation and model interpretation--and the performance measures of the modeling grammar. The utility of the framework is demonstrated by using it to categorize existing work on evaluating modeling techniques. The paper also discusses theoretical foundations that can guide hypothesis generation and measurement of variables. Finally, the paper addresses possible levels for categorical variables and ways to measure interval variables, especially the grammar performance measures.

Renal water reabsorption: A physiologic retrospective in a molecular era

The cloning and sequencing of the aquaporin water channels has been an enormous advance in the biomedical sciences, as recognized by the award of the Nobel Prize to Peter Agre last year. Among many other examples, expression of aquaporin proteins in Xenopus oocytes and other heterologous expression systems has confirmed two important models of renal function: the increase in the water permeability of the collecting duct by antidiuretic hormone (ADH), and the mechanism of near isosmotic volume reabsorption by the proximal tubule. These mechanisms were the subjects of intensive investigation by numerous investigators, including Thomas E. Andreoli, who is being honored by this symposium, and who developed many of the key concepts in these areas. His early work with artificial lipid bilayer membranes and the pore-forming antibiotic amphotericin provided the rigorous foundation in experimental and conceptual modeling techniques that he later applied to physiologic and pathophysiologic mechanisms in the kidney, which are summarized in this retrospective. Dr. Andreoli and his colleagues proposed a water channel mechanism for the action of ADH, which has been confirmed by the cloning and heterologous expression of aquaporin-2. They also proposed that volume reabsorption by the proximal tubule depended on a very high hydraulic conductivity and the development of luminal hypotonicity produced by active solute reabsorption. This model has also been confirmed in mice in which aquaporin-1 expression is knocked out, resulting in a low proximal tubule water permeability that exaggerates the development of luminal hypotonicity.

In-context peer-to-peer information filtering on the Web

In-context peer-to-peer information filtering on the Web

The OO-method approach for information systems modeling: from object-oriented conceptual modeling to automated programming

Current and future (conventional) notations used in Conceptual Modeling Techniques should have a precise (formal) semantics to provide a well-defined software development process, in order to go from specification to implementation in an automated way. To achieve this objective, the OO-method approach to Information Systems Modeling presented in this paper attempts to overcome the conventional (informal)/formal dichotomy by selecting the best ideas from both approaches. The OO-method makes a clear distinction between the problem space (centered on what the system is) and the solution space (centered on how it is implemented as a software product). It provides a precise, conventional graphical notation to obtain a system description at the problem space level, however this notation is strictly based on a formal OO specification language that determines the conceptual modeling constructs needed to obtain the system specification. An abstract execution model determines how to obtain the software representations corresponding to these conceptual modeling constructs. In this way, the final software product can be obtained in an automated way.

Generating code for engineering design systems using software patterns

We illustrate here how software engineers developing engineering design systems can introduce patterns into the conceptual modeling techniques that were developed in the database community and integrate them with techniques that are emerging in the object-oriented analysis and engineering design community. The goal is to raise the level of abstraction used to communicate software specifications and to build applications. This will speed the development and improve the quality of engineering design tools. We show by an example how this can be accomplished through an example software pattern from the software engineering discipline (the observer pattern) [12]. We show how patterns can be automatically supported using the general techniques that were developed in the Semantic Objects, Relationships, and Constraints (SORAC) project [20] for the development of tools, for the specification of databases and for building design systems.

Building E-commerce applications from object-oriented conceptual models

This paper introduces an extension to UML that takes care of web page navigation using the OO-Method, dynamic prototyping, and a new way of specifying the navigation design. Furthermore, a software production process for e-commerce applications design is described. This process is driven by an Object-Oriented Web-Solutions Modeling approach (OOWS), which provides mechanisms to deal with the development of web-based applications. In the proposed process, a system is completely specified using object-oriented conceptual modeling techniques to capture properly the specific functionality of an e-commerce application. We place special emphasis on a navigational model that provides abstraction primitives to capture and represent navigational semantics. With such an extended conceptual model, system functionality and navigational features are described within a unified framework. Once the system specification is completed (problem space level), a strategy to obtain the software components that will constitute the final software product (solution space level) is defined. We briefly discuss how to map these abstraction primitives to e-commerce applications in order to be able to go from the problem space to the solution space in a structured, automated way.

Concept based design of data warehouses

The ESPRIT Project DWQ (Foundations of Data Warehouse Quality) aimed at improving the quality of DW design and operation through systematic enrichment of the semantic foundations of data warehousing. Logic-based knowledge representation and reasoning techniques were developed to control accuracy, consistency, and completeness via advanced conceptual modeling techniques for source integration, data reconciliation, and multi-dimensional aggregation. This is complemented by quantitative optimization techniques for view materialization, optimizing timeliness and responsiveness without losing the semantic advantages from the conceptual approach. At the operational level, query rewriting and materialization refreshment algorithms exploit the knowledge developed at design time. The demonstration shows the interplay of these tools under a shared metadata repository, based on an example extracted from an application at Telecom Italia.

Achieving Reuse Via a Generic Model of Reusable Components

Despite the fact that the field of software reusability has had a significant impact on the engineering of Information Systems (ISs), issues related to the definition of a general purpose reuse model that can serve as a basis of representation for a Repository of Reusable Components (RRC) in generic form for various conceptual modelling techniques of ISs are seldom addressed. A survey of the related research has shown that recent attempts to define reuse models have been limited to those supporting a single ISs methodology. This paper proposes a generic reuse model for taking into account several different ISs methodologies with a single development platform. The generic reuse model not only provides a basis for populating a RRC with reusable components in generic form, but also allows an IS to be conceptualized by reusing the appropriate generic reusable components populated into the RRC through different conceptual models. The generic model provides four concepts for modelling the ideas used in several conceptual models, so that a reusable component extracted through domain analysis with the aid of a conceptual model can be described in generic form or retrieved in the formalism conforming to the appropriate model.

INFORMATION SERVICES FOR THE WEB: BUILDING AND MAINTAINING DOMAIN MODELS

The World Wide Web serves as a leading vehicle for information dissemination by offering information services, such as product information, group interactions, or sales transactions. Three major factors affect the performance and reliability of information services for the Web, namely the distribution of information which has resulted from the globalization of information systems, the heterogeneity of information sources, and the sources' instability caused by autonomous evolution. This paper focuses on integrating existing information sources, available via the Web, in the delivery of information services. The primary objective of the paper is to provide mechanisms for structuring and maintaining domain models for Web applications. These mechanisms are based on conceptual modeling techniques, where concepts are being defined and refined within a metadata repository through the use of instantiation, specialization and attribution. Also, active databases techniques are exploited to provide robust mechanisms for maintaining a consistent domain model in a rapidly evolving environment, such as the Web. Therefore, the main contribution of the paper lies in the provision of an architecture for semi-automatic generation and maintenance of user-oriented, semantic-based domain models that describe distributed heterogeneous information sources.

Towards the construction of workflow‐suitable conceptual modelling techniques

Despite their high‐level and graphical nature, workflow specifications require a significant amount of implementation detail — for example application programming interface, database access and programming mechanisms for information flow — for a more comprehensive validation than is currently possible. This is currently recognized as a deficiency in workflow conceptualization. Although conceptual modelling techniques are available which are expressive, comprehensive and precise enough, we believe, their concepts and features are not specialized enough for workflow domains. In this paper, we offer a comparative insight into techniques which characterize different aspects and approaches of workflow specifications. These are: structured process modelling, object‐oriented modelling, behavioural process modelling and business‐oriented modelling. In particular, we determine gaps for workflows capturing operational business transaction processing, for example those of insurance claims, bank loans and government‐related registration. For technique construction, we describe five workflow suitability principles.

Deriving Identity from Extensionality

In recent years, a number of proposals have been made to extend conventional conceptual data modeling techniques with concepts for modeling complex object structures. Among the most prominent proposed concepts is the concept of collection type. A collection type is an object type of which the instances are sets of instances of another object type. A drawback of the introduction of such a new concept is that the formal definition of the technique involved becomes considerably more complex. In this paper a new kind of constraint, the extensional uniqueness constraint, is introduced, providing an alternative treatment of complex object types. The formal definition of this constraint type is presented, the advantages of its introduction are discussed, and its consequences for, among others, identification schemes are elaborated.

A Comparative Study of Conceptual Data Modeling Techniques

This paper compares conceptual data models including extended entity relationship (EER), semantic object model (SOM), object role modeling (ORM), and object modeling technique (OMT) in terms of model correctness, modeling time, and perceived ease-of-use. For an empirical study, 28 graduates and 72 undergraduates were selected and then divided into four equally sized groups. Each group was trained with one data modeling technique. Two cases were used; one was prepared in natural language and the other in enterprise form. The study results show some differences among the four conceptual data modeling techniques. These positive findings may help modelers better understand modeling techniques.

Conceptual modelling for technology assessment of IT systems ‐ smart cards and health information systems

A method peculiar to sociocybernetics as a paradigm is dynamic simulation. In the case of information technological (IT) systems, which are socio‐technical systems, a qualitative (conceptual, cognitive) approach is more appropriate than a quantitative one. Already intermediate results of conceptual work aimed at a computer model have been found useful. Illustrates this via three case studies from IT in health care, in which the sociocybernetic problem‐functionalist conceptual (SPC) modelling technique was used. Two studies are from the “EUROCARDS Concerted Action on Extending the Use of Patient Data Cards”; the third concerns the development of health information systems in the Aral Basin. In all cases, a wide variety of information and materials was needed for modelling. To keep track of this, proposes a sociocybernetic standard variable number (SC‐SVN).

The impact of linguistics on conceptual models: consistency and understandability

This paper describes a vision in which linguistic knowledge and theories are introduced into conceptual modeling, and it sums up the advantages achieved by this approach. We will show how the extension of conceptual modeling techniques with linguistic theories increases their expressive power, the capability to formalize well-known conceptual aspects, like object roles and constraints, and their internal consistency. Furthermore, we will explain the advantages gained from using such an extended conceptual modeling technique by describing the adjustments and improvements of the modeling process itself and the extensions to the validation and verification process of the sophisticated models. We will demonstrate this approach by introducing a linguistically based modeling environment, Color-X.

Integrating methods for the design of real-time systems

With the aim of designing complex real-time systems, we investigate the integration of conceptual modeling techniques, formal specification, and compositional verification. A constructive transformation is defined from a conceptual meta-model to a real-time specification language. Refinement steps can be verified formally by means of compositional proof rules. The approach is illustrated by the design of a mine pump control system.

Conceptual schemas with abstractions making flat conceptual schemas more comprehensible

Flat graphical, conceptual modeling techniques are widely accepted as visually effective ways in which to specify and communicate the conceptual data requirements of an information system. Conceptual schema diagrams provide modelers with a picture of the salient structures underlying the modeled universe of discourse, in a form that can readily be understood by and communicated to users, programmers and managers. When complexity and size of applications increase, however, the success of these techniques in terms of comprehensibility and communicability deteriorates rapidly. This paper proposes a method to offset this deterioration, by adding abstraction layers to flat conceptual schemas. We present an algorithm to recursively derive higher levels of abstraction from a given (flat) conceptual schema. The driving force of this algorithm is a hierarchy of conceptual importance among the elements of the universe of discourse.