The Details of Conceptual Modelling Notations are Important - A Comparison of Relationship Normative Language

Discussions of conceptual modelling assume that notation details are of secondary importance, a matter of taste and past experience rather than of science. For example, it does not really matter if cardinality is shown with a \u27crow\u27s foot\u27 or with the symbol \u271..*\u27. This paper argues that such an assumption is wrong and that the notation is extremely important in the process of modelling relationships because of the normative language that the notation specifies. Normative language is shown to be a useful way of understanding and comparing relationship notation. Barker\u27s practical relationship definition, using a formal notation, is shown to be sufficiently well formed to allow the modeller to make sense of the domain in their own linguistic context. Less formal notations are shown to disadvantage the less experienced modelle

An Interpretive Study of How Practitioners Use Entity-Relationship Modelling in a Ternary Relationship Situation

This paper discusses the use of interpretive research to learn about the practicality of entity-relationship modelling in ternary relationship situations. The findings can be compared with previous studies of novice modellers who used the same invented scenario. Previous research excluded the interaction between practitioners that would occur during a modelling session because novices were used to complete tasks in isolation. A team of experienced practitioners are shown to use entity-relationship modelling in a business context of social interaction about design. The interaction proves to be a key part of the modelling process. Practitioners \u27talk with the notation\u27 as well as using the notation to draw a diagram. The entity-relationship model constrains the social interaction because the model provides a way of talking about design. The practitioners use the model to talk about a normalized relational data structure in a way that undermines the idea of the entity-relationship model as an independent conceptual model. The findings show that theories from the field of linguistics explain why the model is used in this design-dependent way and suggest that this dependency may be inevitable. When the design conversation is about a normalized relational data structure there is no benefit to the practitioners from using a special notation for ternary relationships. On the contrary, the practitioner\u27s design dependence seems to enable them to expose aspects of a domain that do not make business sense. The wider implication is that interpretive research\u27s role is important in generating insights about the extent to which conceptual modelling is usable by practitioners. Interpretive research highlights the importance of being able to distinguish between ideas about conceptual modelling and ideas about how to apply modelling to practice

ON THE THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS OF RESEARCH INTO THE UNDERSTANDABILITY OF BUSINESS PROCESS MODELS

Against the background of the growing significance of Business Process Management (BPM) for Information Systems (IS) research and practice, especially the field of Business Process Modeling gains more and more importance. Business process models support communication about as well as the coordination of processes and have become a widely adopted tool in practice. As the understandability of business process models plays a crucial role in communication processes, more and more studies on process model understandability have been conducted in IS research. This article aims at investigating underlying theories of research into business process model understandability by means of an in-depth analysis of 126 systematically retrieved research articles on the topic. It shows in how far process model understandability research is multi-theoretically founded. Identified theories differ regarding addressed subject matters, their coverage, their focus as well as the underlying notion of model understanding, which is exemplarily demonstrated and discussed in this article. Moreover, implications of the findings are discussed and an outlook on future business process model understandability research and on the integration potential of theories in this field is given

USER EVALUATION OF SYMBOLS FOR CORE BUSINESS PROCESS MODELING CONCEPTS

Process modeling notations are visual languages that use symbols to represent their main concepts. This study investigates the quality of such symbols from users’ perspective. The design of a symbol influences whether it is easy to spot in a model and is correctly associated with the concept it represents. In an empirical study with 188 participants, the normative ratings of process model symbols (for the basic concepts of start, end, task, AND, XOR) were gathered on the dimensions of perceptual pop-out, semantic transparency, perceptual discriminability, and aesthetics. Overall, the results are consistent with our predictions based on the theoretical analyses of the designs of the symbols. Prior familiarity with process modeling notations led to more clear-cut evaluations of routing symbols (AND, XOR) and a reduced tendency to prefer middle rating options, but it did not affect the evaluations of the other symbols. Standardization organizations and academic developers of notations can use insights from the study to enhance the usability of process modeling notations

Towards an interoperable metamodel suite: size assessment as one input

In recent years, many metamodels have been introduced in the software engi- neering literature and standards. These metamodels vary in their focus across, for example, process, product, organizational and measurement aspects of software development and have typically been developed independently of each other with shared concepts being only accidental. There is thus an increasing concern in the standards communities that possible conicts of structure and semantics between these various metamodels will hinder their widespread adoption. The complexity of these metamodels has also increased significantly and is another barrier in their appreciation. This complexity is compounded when more than one metamodel is used in the lifecycle of a software project. Therefore there is a need to have interoperable metamodels. As a first step towards engendering interoperability and/or possible mergers between metamodels, we examine the size and complexity of various meta- models. To do this, we have used the Rossi and Brinkkemper metrics-based approach to evaluate the size and complexity of several standard metamodels including UML 2.3, BPMN 2.0, ODM, SMM and OSM. The size and complexity of these metamodels is also compared with the previous version of UML, BPMN and Activity diagrams. The comparatively large sizes of BPMN 2.0 and UML 2.3 suggest that future integration with these metamodels might be more difficult than with the other metamodels under study (especially ODM, SSM and OSM)

Graphical Research Models in the Information Systems Discipline

Graphical models facilitate communicating hypothesized or tested relationships between variables and are welcome in information systems publications. However, insufficient knowledge exists about design conventions for such models, lowering their communicative effectiveness. This paper investigates how graphical research models are used in the information systems literature. Theoretically, the article bears upon the perspective of prototypicality and cognitively effective design of conceptual modeling notations. Based on an analysis of 134 research models from 589 articles in information systems journals, we tentatively demonstrate prototypical features of visual research models and outline many unique graphical variations. We develop a set of hypotheses on how prototypicality influences preferences for research models and their comprehensibility and describe how we intend to test these hypotheses empirically. A broader goal of this research is to develop an effective modeling notation for research models to support researchers in constructing unambiguous visual models for their research

Investigating business process elements: a journey from the field of Business Process Management to ontological analysis, and back

Business process modelling languages (BPMLs) typically enable the representation of business processes via the creation of process models, which are constructed using the elements and graphical symbols of the BPML itself. Despite the wide literature on business process modelling languages, on the comparison between graphical components of different languages, on the development and enrichment of new and existing notations, and the numerous definitions of what a business process is, the BPM community still lacks a robust (ontological) characterisation of the elements involved in business process models and, even more importantly, of the very notion of business process. While some efforts have been done towards this direction, the majority of works in this area focuses on the analysis of the behavioural (control flow) aspects of process models only, thus neglecting other central modelling elements, such as those denoting process participants (e.g., data objects, actors), relationships among activities, goals, values, and so on. The overall purpose of this PhD thesis is to provide a systematic study of the elements that constitute a business process, based on ontological analysis, and to apply these results back to the Business Process Management field. The major contributions that were achieved in pursuing our overall purpose are: (i) a first comprehensive and systematic investigation of what constitutes a business process meta-model in literature, and a definition of what we call a literature-based business process meta-model starting from the different business process meta-models proposed in the literature; (ii) the ontological analysis of four business process elements (event, participant, relationship among activities, and goal), which were identified as missing or problematic in the literature and in the literature-based meta-model; (iii) the revision of the literature-based business process meta-model that incorporates the analysis of the four investigated business process elements - event, participant, relationship among activities and goal; and (iv) the definition and evaluation of a notation that enriches the relationships between activities by including the notions of occurrence dependences and rationales