ER2015

The Role of Ontological Analysis in Educating to Conceptual Modeling 
Invited Talk by Nicola Guarino 

Challenges in Teaching Conceptual Modeling for Architecting
Gerrit Muller*
* HBV, Norway

Domain models are representations of areas of knowledge describing phenomena, requirements, problems, capabilities, and solutions. The creation of domain models is challenging. In this tutorial we will review some ways to automate domain modeling and discuss the boundaries of automation in this context. We will concentrate on an ontological and conceptual approach, called SOVA, which primarily examines domain behaviors.

The main goals of the tutorial are:

1. To expose the audience to existing studies that deal with (semi-)automatic domain modeling
2. To introduce an ontological and conceptual approach to conduct behavioral domain modeling
3. To discuss the benefits and deficiencies of automatic domain modeling

Learning requirements analysis and validation through conceptual modeling is very hard. Experienced analysts manage to mentally picture (i.e. simulate) the future information system in their mind while analyzing and validation requirements. This skill is very hard to achieve by junior requirements engineers. Not surprisingly, computer-based simulation has been proven to be an excellent technique in assisting juniors in understanding complex systems. However, the practical use of computer-based simulation is hampered by the difficulty of swiftly generating simulations out of conceptual models and the difficulty of interpreting simulation results. This tutorial reviews the challenges in teaching conceptual modeling and model simulation, and the gains that can be obtained when using feedback-enabled simulation. The tutorial is based on a novel, award winning and scientifically proven method that boosts the learning achievements in conceptual modeling.

Next Release Tool
Fatma Başak Aydemir, Dagmawi Neway Mekuria, Paolo Giorgini, and John Mylopoulos

Fortuna: a Visualization Tool for Probabilistic Cardinality Constraints
Tania K. Roblot, and Sebastian Link

A Multi-Agent Systems Engineering Tool based on Ontologies
Artur Freitas, Lucas Hilgert, Sabrina Marczak Felipe Meneguzzi, Rafael H. Bordini, and Renata Vieira
Presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt5ZVG1cgBQ

The Anchor Modeler, an Open Source Information Modeling Tool
Lars Rönnbäck

Effects of Simulation on Novices’ Understanding of the Concept of Inheritance in Conceptual Modeling
Gayane Sedrakyan* and Monique Snoeck*
* Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Management Information Systems, Leuven 

The Importance of Teaching Systematic Analysis for Conceptual Models: An Experience Report
Elda Paja*, Jennifer Horkoff** and John Mylopoulos*
* University of Trento, Italy
** City University London, UK 

Reuse of Simulated Cases in Teaching Enterprise Modelling
Ilia Bider*, Martin Henkel*, Stewart Kowalski* and Erik Perjons*
* Stockholm University, Sweden

Participants in ER2015 are welcomed at a reception hosted by the City of Stockholm. It will take place at the Stockholm City Hall (Stadshuset), where the Nobel prize banquet is held each year. The Stockholm City Hall is situated on the island Kungsholmen in the center of Stockholm. It is one of the foremost tourist attractions in Stockholm; please visit http://international.stockholm.se/the-city-hall/ for more information.

The City Hall is just a short walk away from the central station. For information on how to arrive there, please visit this page.

Chair: Andreas L. Opdahl

The digital transformation of the society has disruptive implications on all sectors, and conceptual modelling will be no exception. This keynote will cover some of the emerging impacts digital opportunities will have on the way conceptual modelling is conducted and the type of conceptual models needed. First, the move from an age of automation to an age of digitisation shifts the attention from corporations to people leading to a higher demand for digital identities, ‘personal conceptual models’ and a requirement to capture birth-to-death value chains. Second, the pressure to reduce innovation latency will require improvement patterns and predictive capabilities demanding ‘proactive conceptual models’ which will serve as recommender systems for their users. Third, a shift towards ‘real-time conceptual modelling’ will increase the relevance of mining and context-aware solutions leading to a higher alignment between conceptual models and the reality they are depicting. The presentation will end with some further predictions on the nature and research opportunities of ‘conceptual modelling 3.0’.

Session Chair: Peter Chen, Carnegie Mellon University

Presentation slides can be found here

Speakers/Panelists 

• Privacy and Big Data
  Dr. Nick Multari
  Pacific Northwest National Lab., US
• Conceptual Modeling on NoSQL/Big Data
  Dr. Tok Wang Ling
  Univ. of Singapore
• Characterizing Research on Big Data and Security based on a Bibliometric Study
  Dr. Jacky Akoka
  CNAM, France
• Software R&D Trends
  Dr. Matthias Jarke
  RWTH-Aachen, Germany
• Modeling for Quality Aware Software Engineering
  Henrich Mayr
  AAU, Austria

In this tutorial, we present a novel ontological theory of relationships and explore its consequences in addressing a number of important and recurrent conceptual modeling problems. These problems range from identity and modality of relationships, taxonomic structures over relations and systematic ambiguity in cardinality constraints.

1. Relations and relationships

2. The needs for reification
2.1 The relation attribute problem
2.2 The cardinality problem
2.3 The problem of anadic relations

3. The nature of reified relationships: Identity and Modality
3.1 Relationships as tuples
3.2 Relationships a facts
3.3 Relationships as episodes (perdurants)
3.4 Relationships as objects (endurants)

4. Ontological patterns involving Relations
4.1 Ontological Meta-Properties and Taxonomic Structures over Relations
4.2 Relation Specialization, Subsetting and Redefinition with an ontological twist
4.3 Ontological Anti-Patterns involving Relations and Reified Relationships

5. Concrete Examples (including a Commitment-Based Service Ontology)

Chair: Heinrich C. Mayr

The era of big data has arrived. Big data brings us the data-driven paradigm and enlightens us to challenge different classes of problems we were not able to solve in the past.  We are beginning to see the impacts of big data in every aspect of our lives and society. There are myriads of big data technologies available to us and much hype on how we can make the most of those technologies to extract values from big data projects. The conceptual modeling community has brought analysis and design as the key components of software and information system development lifecycles. In this talk, I argue that the conceptual modeling community could significantly contribute to the understanding, development, management, and education related to big data projects.  I will review recent advances in big data technologies and best practices in big data project management. Then, I will present how the conceptual modeling community could contribute to the successful use of big data technologies and what we can do for the management of big data projects. Finally, I will present several applications from healthcare projects in which I have been involved.

Linked data are becoming one of the most adopted model used to publish data on the Web. Thanks to the possibility to connect different datasets by means of the RDF features, linked data are suitable to fully exploit the nature of the Web. Even if a lot of tools are available supporting the publication of linked data, in the literature there is a lack of a systematic methodology supporting the publication of linked data, from the identification of the most suitable datasets to be released, to the design of the properties and ontologies to use.

The project COMSODE (Components Supporting the Open Data Exploitation) is an SME-driven RTD project aimed at progressing the capabilities in the Open Data re-use field. COMSODE wants to bring state of the art of research into a solid and industrial set of solutions to overcome the current issues: data published by various open data catalogues are poorly integrated; quality assessment, and cleansing are seldom addressed. COMSODE offers a software platform which enables data consumers to integrate the data before their usage. Therefore, it significantly reduces the costs of open data consumption and hinders open data usage and uptake.

The goal of this tutorial is twofold: on the one hand, a brief comparison of different solutions to the Open Data world will be introduced; on the other hand, we will show in particular how to develop the publication of datasets as Open Data by using the COMSODE methodology and publication platform (ODN), its tools and its data. In this tutorial, all the approaches, best practices, techniques and tools analyzed and systematized in the methodological part of the project will be overviewed, for their relation with the COMSODE “Open Data Publication” Methodology, in the following form:

• Phases, i.e., the steps of the methodology;
• Cross-cutting activities, i.e., the steps that are transversal to more than one phase;
• Artefacts, i.e., the input and output of the different phases, activities and tasks;
• Roles, i.e., who could be responsible, consultable, or simply informed of the publication of datasets into open data in an organization;
• Practices, i.e., the techniques and tools to accomplish the different steps and activities related to the management of datasets to obtain their corresponding open data artifacts.