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Conceptual Models and Their Foundations

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Model and Data Engineering (MEDI 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 11815))

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Abstract

There is no common agreement which artifact should (not) be considered to be a conceptual model although the term ‘conceptual model’ is used for more than for five decades in computer science and for more than one century in science and engineering. A team from all faculties at our university has been able to develop a notion of model that covers all model notions known in the disciplines of this team. We now introduce three notions of conceptual model in this paper: light, slim, and concise versions of the notion of conceptual model.

The paper answers the following questions: Are all models also conceptual models? What is a conceptual model? Is there a formal notion of a conceptual model? What is not yet a conceptual model? What will never be a conceptual model? What is a concept? Which philosophical and scientific foundations we should consider while modelling? Is the existence of an ontology a necessary prerequisite for the being as conceptual model?

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Due to the utilisation of artifacts as instrument we will concentrate on the instrument being of artifacts. This approach allows us to additionally consider virtual ‘artifacts’ such as mental models. An artifact is “something created by humans, usually for practical purpose. It is a product of artificial character due to extraneous (as human) agency”. [4]. Furthermore, models can be real artifacts as well as thoughts. An additional difficulty is the negative usage of “artifact” in engineering as artificially introduced change (e.g. in presentation, miss or imperfection).

  2. 2.

    Facetted search for the term “conceptual model” in DBLP results in more than 6.000 hits for titles in papers (normal DBLP search also above 3.500 titles).

  3. 3.

    The ER modelling language has been introduced in 1976. The first and primary utilisation scenario was documentation of relational structure. Later, conceptualisation has been considered to be the main issue. The conferences on conceptual modelling started in 1979 (First as ER conferences; since 1996 the series got its name with the ER acronym.) The formalisation and a proper definition of the ER modelling language occurred more than 15 years later [30]. One might claim that it is nowadays too early to define the notion of conceptual model.

  4. 4.

    We acknowledge the communication with J. E. Gapanyuk from Bauman Moscow State Technical University (10.10.2018) who proposed this illustrations in Figs. 3 and 4.

  5. 5.

    \(\uplus \) is depicts the disjoint union. \(\oplus \) denotes the combination. \(\bowtie \) denotes the integration (e.g. join) (see [30] for database operations).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Christian-Albrechts University at Kiel, 24098, Kiel, Germany

    Bernhard Thalheim

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  1. Bernhard Thalheim
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Correspondence to Bernhard Thalheim .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. UIUC Institute, Zhejiang University, Zhejiang, China

    Klaus-Dieter Schewe

  2. INPT-ENSEEIHT/IRIT, Toulouse, France

    Neeraj Kumar Singh

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Thalheim, B. (2019). Conceptual Models and Their Foundations. In: Schewe, KD., Singh, N. (eds) Model and Data Engineering. MEDI 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11815. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32065-2_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32065-2_9

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