This book compiles contributions from renowned researchers covering all aspects of conceptual modeling, on the occasion of Arne Sølvberg’s 67th birthday. Friends of this pioneer in information systems modeling contribute their latest research results from such fields as data modeling, goal-oriented modeling, agent-oriented modeling, and process-oriented modeling. The book reflects the most important recent developments and application areas of conceptual modeling, and highlights trends in conceptual modeling for the next decade.

This brilliant textbook explains in detail the principles of conceptual modeling independently from particular methods and languages and shows how to apply them in real-world projects. The author covers all aspects of the engineering process from structural modeling over behavioral modeling to meta-modeling, and completes the presentation with an extensive case study based on the osCommerce system. Written for computer science students in classes on information systems modeling as well as for professionals feeling the need to formalize their experiences or to update their knowledge, Olivé delivers here a comprehensive treatment of all aspects of the modeling process. His book is complemented by lots of exercises and additional online teaching material.

The increasing penetration of IT in organizations calls for an integrative perspective on enterprises and their supporting information systems. MERODE offers an intuitive and practical approach to enterprise modelling and using these models as core for building enterprise information systems. From a business analyst perspective, benefits of the approach are its simplicity and the possibility to evaluate the consequences of modeling choices through fast prototyping, without requiring any technical experience. The focus on domain modelling ensures the development of a common language for talking about essential business concepts and of a shared understanding of business rules. On the construction side, experienced benefits of the approach are a clear separation between specification and implementation, more generic and future-proof systems, and an improved insight in the cost of changes. A first distinguishing feature is the method’s grounding in process algebra provides clear criteria and practical support for model quality. Second, the use of the concept of business events provides a deep integration between structural and behavioral aspects. The clear and intuitive semantics easily extend to application integration (COTS software and Web Services). Students and practitioners are the book’s main target audience, as both groups will benefit from its practical advice on how to create complete models which combine structural and behavioral views of a system-to-be and which can readily be transformed into code, and on how to evaluate the quality of those models. In addition, researchers in the area of conceptual or enterprise modelling will find a concise overview of the main findings related to the MERODE project. The work is complemented by a wealth of extra material on the author’s web page at KU Leuven, including a free CASE tool with code generator, a collection of cases with solutions, and a set of domain modelling patterns that have been developed on the basis of the method’s use in industry and government.

Conceptual modeling has always been one of the main issues in information systems engineering as it aims to describe the general knowledge of the system at an abstract level that facilitates user understanding and software development. This collection of selected papers provides a comprehensive and extremely readable overview of what conceptual modeling is and perspectives on making it more and more relevant in our society. It covers topics like modeling the human genome, blockchain technology, model-driven software development, data integration, and wiki-like repositories and demonstrates the general applicability of conceptual modeling to various problems in diverse domains. Overall, this book is a source of inspiration for everybody in academia working on the vision of creating a strong, fruitful and creative community of conceptual modelers. With this book the editors and authors want to honor Prof. Antoni Olivé for his enormous and ongoing contributions to the conceptual modeling discipline. It was presented to him on the occasion of his keynote at ER 2017 in Valencia, a conference that he has contributed to and supported for over 20 years. Thank you very much to Antoni for so many years of cooperation and friendship.

Requirements engineering has since long acknowledged the importance of the notion that system requirements are stakeholder goals—rather than system functions—and ought to be elicited, modeled and analyzed accordingly. In this book, Nurcan and her co-editors collected twenty contributions from leading researchers in requirements engineering with the intention to comprehensively present an overview of the different perspectives that exist today, in 2010, on the concept of intention in the information systems community. These original papers honor Colette Rolland for her contributions to this field, as she was probably the first to emphasize that ‘intention’ has to be considered as a first-class concept in information systems engineering. Written by long-term collaborators (and most often friends) of Colette Rolland, this volume covers topics like goal-oriented requirements engineering, model-driven development, method engineering, and enterprise modeling. As such, it is a tour d’horizon of Colette Rolland’s lifework, and is presented to her on the occasion of her retirement at CaISE 2010 in Hammamet, the conference she once cofounded and which she helped to grow and prosper for more than 20 years.

Conceptual modeling is about describing the semantics of software applications at a high level of abstraction in terms of structure, behavior, and user interaction. Embley and Thalheim start with a manifesto stating that the dream of developing information systems strictly by conceptual modeling – as expressed in the phrase “the model is the code” – is becoming reality. The subsequent contributions written by leading researchers in the field support the manifesto's assertions, showing not only how to abstractly model complex information systems but also how to formalize abstract specifications in ways that let developers complete programming tasks within the conceptual model itself. They are grouped into sections on programming with conceptual models, structure modeling, process modeling, user interface modeling, and special challenge areas such as conceptual geometric modeling, information integration, and biological conceptual modeling. The Handbook of Conceptual Modeling collects in a single volume many of the best conceptual-modeling ideas, techniques, and practices as well as the challenges that drive research in the field. Thus it is much more than a traditional handbook for advanced professionals, as it also provides both a firm foundation for the field of conceptual modeling, and points researchers and graduate students towards interesting challenges and paths for how to contribute to this fundamental field of computer science.

This book introduces and describes in detail the SEQUAL framework for understanding the quality of models and modeling languages, including the numerous specializations of the generic framework, and the various ways in which this can be used for different applications. Topics and features: contains case studies, chapter summaries, review questions, problems and exercises throughout the text, in addition to Appendices on terminology and abbreviations; presents a thorough introduction to the most important concepts in conceptual modeling, including the underlying philosophical outlook on the quality of models; describes the basic tasks and model types in information systems development and evolution, and the main methodologies for mixing different phases of information system development; provides an overview of the general mechanisms and perspectives used in conceptual modeling; predicts future trends in technological development, and discusses how the role of modeling can be envisaged in this landscape.