Object-role Modeling Models Research Articles

Automated Verbalization of ORM Models in Malay and Mandarin

Fact-oriented modeling approaches such as Object-Role Modeling (ORM) include a rich graphical notation for capturing business constraints, allowing modelers to visualize fine details of their data models. These data models should be validated with domain experts who best understand the business requirements, even if unfamiliar with the graphical notation. Hence, the data models are best validated by verbalizing the models in a controlled natural language, and by populating the relevant fact types with examples. Comparatively little support exists for verbalizing fact-based models in non-English languages, especially Asian languages. This paper describes the authors' work on verbalizing ORM models in Bahasa Melayu (Malay) and Mandarin. The authors specify some typical transformation patterns, discuss features of these languages requiring special treatment (e.g. noun classifiers, repositioning of modal operators, and different uses for terms equivalent to “who” and “that” in English), and describe their current implementation efforts.

Lightweight formalization and validation of ORM models

ORM (Object Role Modeling) is a rich and popular conceptual modeling method. ORM has been used for data modeling, ontology engineering, modeling business rules, XML-Schemes and data warehouses, requirements engineering and web forms. Automated reasoning like satisfiability testing allows developers to detect modeling mistakes in the early stages of development. In this paper we propose a lightweight formalization of the ORM meta-model in Alloy. Using this meta-model as a toolkit one can easily specify ORM models in Alloy and verify various properties on them using the Alloy Analyzer. In order to achieve scalability, we use the cardinality of concepts to model their population. This increases the scalability of the approach dramatically. To show an application of the meta-model we formalize some unsatisfiability patterns and check them on the Alloy representation of the ORM model.

Representing object role modeling models with Web ontology language description logic axioms

Object Role Modeling(ORM) has been used in ontology engineering to model domain ontology,which needs to represent ORM models in OWL DL axioms to check semantic conflicts and redundancy with DL reasoners,and to publish ORM ontology on the semantic Web.By means of comparing the semantics of ORM model and OWL DL axioms,equivalently model-converting,and introducing new operators and properties,that mapping rules to represent ORM models in OWL DL axioms was proposed.Except a few constraints,most ORM model elements can be represented by OWL DL axioms.

Object-Role Modeling

Object-Role Modeling (ORM) is an approach for modeling and querying information at the conceptual level, and for transforming ORM models and queries to or from other representations. Unlike attribute-based approaches such as Entity-Relationship (ER) modeling and class modeling within the Unified Modeling Language (UML), ORM is fact-oriented, where all facts and rules are modeled in terms of natural sentences easily understood and validated by nontechnical business users. ORM’s modeling procedure facilitates validation by verbalization and population with concrete examples. ORM’s graphical notation is far more expressive than that of ER diagrams or UML class diagrams, and its attribute-free nature makes it more stable and adaptable to changing business requirements. This article explains the fundamentals of ORM, illustrates some of its advantages as a data modeling approach, and outlines some recent research to extend ORM, with special attention to mappings to deductive databases.