Models are the fundamental human tools for managing complexity and understanding. As such, they play a key role in all scientific and engineering disciplines as well as in everyday life. Many modelling paradigms have evolved over time in various disciplines, a central one in computer science being that of conceptual modelling. This is especially indispensable in the development of database and information systems. However, as a universal tool, conceptual models also play an important role in other areas of computer science, although they are not often referred to as such.
Despite the widespread usage of conceptual modeling, the community is still tinkering with foundations and theories - and also with the notion itself: more than 60 definitions can be found in the database field alone - with the somewhat sobering result that in concrete situations one has often difficulties deciding whether a conceptual model is present or not.
On the other hand, conceptual modeling has a history of at least 4,000 years, with many success stories in a wide variety of fields. Therefore, we should strive to develop a common understanding of the notion and essence of modeling, and conceptual modeling in particular, as well as a (mathematical) toolbox for modeling activities.
With this tutorial we want to show some puzzle pieces to answer these research challenges and to stimulate the discussion. In particular, we address the "anatomy" of conceptual models and show how they can be characterized by a signature and thus distinguished from other types of models.
We combine this with a more transparent explanation of the nature of conceptual models, seeing them as a link between the dimension of linguistic terms and the encyclopedic or ontological dimension of notions. As a paradigm, we use the triptych, whose central tableau represents the model dimension. We base our explanation on several examples of conceptual modeling from very different subject areas and with recourse to different modeling languages.
2 окт 2024
