An Experimental Study of the Effects of Representing Property Precedence on the Comprehension of Conceptual Schemas

Conceptual modeling is the process of using a grammar to construct abstractions of relevant phenomena in a domain. The resulting conceptual schemas are intended to facilitate understanding of and communication about a domain during information systems requirements analysis and during design. Despite keen practitioner interest in conceptual modeling, there is general agreement that the modeling constructs comprising grammars lack theoretical foundations pertaining to what the constructs are intended to represent, which, in turn, inhibits our understanding of whether and why they are effective. This research contributes to our understanding of conceptual modeling grammars by proposing a theoretically-grounded approach for modeling an important aspect of the nature of properties of the phenomena of interest in a domain. Specifically, conceptual schemas typically fail to express explicitly the semantics that, when things possess particular properties, they must also possess certain other properties. This research uses Bunge’s ontological notion of property precedence as the theoretical rationale for explicitly modeling this dependence in conceptual schema diagrams. We examine several forms of precedence, and propose an approach to representing one form in conceptual schemas. We present the results of a laboratory experiment that tests the impact of explicitly representing precedence on how well participants comprehend the semantics conveyed by a conceptual schema. The results indicate that modeling precedence explicitly improves the comprehension of domain semantics expressed in a diagram’s structure, but has varying effects on subjects’ confidence in their comprehension

Operational specification for FCA using Z

We present an outline of a process by which operational software requirements specifications can be written for Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). The Z notation is used to specify the FCA model and the formal operations on it. We posit a novel approach whereby key features of Z and FCA can be integrated and put to work in contemporary software development, thus promoting operational specification as a useful application of conceptual structures.</p

Evolving information systems: meeting the ever-changing environment

To meet the demands of organizations and their ever-changing environment, information systems are required which are able to evolve to the same extent as organizations do. Such a system has to support changes in all time-and application-dependent aspects. In this paper, requirements and a conceptual framework for evolving information systems are presented. This framework includes an architecture for such systems and a revision of the traditional notion of update. Based on this evolutionary notion of update (recording, correction and forgetting) a state transition-oriented model on three levels of abstraction (event level, recording level, correction level) is introduced. Examples are provided to illustrate the conceptual framework for evolving information systems

Integration with Ontologies

One of today’s hottest IT topics is integration, as bringing together information from different sources and structures is not completely solved. The approach outlined here wants to illustrate how ontologies [Gr93] could help to support the integration process

Technological Spaces: An Initial Appraisal

In this paper, we propose a high level view of technological spaces (TS) and relations among these spaces. A technological space is a working context with a set of associated concepts, body of knowledge, tools, required skills, and possibilities. It is often associated to a given user community with shared know-how, educational support, common literature and even workshop and conference regular meetings. Although it is difficult to give a precise definition, some TSs can be easily identified, e.g. the XML TS, the DBMS TS, the abstract syntax TS, the meta-model (OMG/MDA) TS, etc. The purpose of our work is not to define an abstract theory of technological spaces, but to figure out how to work more efficiently by using the best possibilities of each technology. To do so, we need a basic understanding of the similarities and differences between various TSs, and also of the possible operational bridges that will allow transferring the results obtained in one TS to other TS. We hope that the presented industrial vision may help us putting forward the idea that there could be more cooperation than competition among alternative technologies. Furthermore, as the spectrum of such available technologies is rapidly broadening, the necessity to offer clear guidelines when choosing practical solutions to engineering problems is becoming a must, not only for teachers but for project leaders as well