Keywords: Accessibility, Conceptual Modeling, Disability, Modeling tools, Systematic Literature Review, Tool Review
Astract: The reports on Disability by the World Health Organization show that the number of people with disabilities is increasing. Consequently, accessibility should play an essential role in information systems engineering research. While software and web engineering research acknowledge this need by providing, e.g., web accessibility guidelines and testing frameworks, we show in this paper, based on a systematic review of the literature and current modeling tools, that accessibility is, so far, a blind spot in conceptual modeling research. With the paper at hand, we aim to identify current research gaps and delineate a vision toward more inclusive, i.e., disability-aware conceptual modeling. One key finding relates to a gap in research and tool support concerning physical disabilities. Based on these results, we further present the first modeling tool that can be used keyboard-only, thereby including users with physical disabilities to engage in conceptual modeling.

Keywords: Generic Framework, Genetic Algorithm, Modularization
Astract: Conceptual models need to be comprehensible and maintainable by humans to exploit their full value in faithfully representing a subject domain. Modularization, i.e. breaking down the monolithic model into smaller, comprehensible chunks has proven very valuable to maintain this value even for very large models. The quality of modularization however often depends on application-specific requirements, the domain, and the modeling language. A well-defined generic modularizing framework applicable to different modeling languages and requirements is lacking. In this paper, we present a customizable and generic multi-objective conceptual models modularization framework. The multi-objective aspect supports addressing heterogeneous requirements while the framework’s genericity supports modularization for arbitrary modeling languages and its customizability is provided by adopting the modularization configuration up to the level of using user-defined heuristics. Our approach applies genetic algorithms to search for a set of optimal solutions. In this paper, we present the details of our Generic Genetic Modularization Framework with a case study to show i) the feasibility of our approach by modularizing models from multiple modeling languages, ii) the customizability by using different objectives for the modularization quality, and, finally, iii) a comparative performance evaluation of our approach on a dataset of ER and ECore models.

Keywords: Conceptual modeling, Human–computer interaction, Information visualization, Modeling tools, Notation, Taxonomy
Astract: Conceptual modeling is integral to computer science research and is widely adopted in industrial practices, e.g., business process and enterprise architecture management. Providing adequate and usable modeling tools is necessary to adopt modeling languages efficiently. Meta-modeling platforms provide a rich and mature set of functionalities for realizing state-of-the-art modeling tools. These tools, albeit their stability and rich set of features, often lack a modern look and feel considering (i) how they visualize the models, and (ii) how modelers interact with the models. Current web technologies enable much richer, advanced opportunities for visualizing and interacting with conceptual models. However, a structured and comprehensive overview of possible information visualization and interaction techniques linked to conceptual models and modeling tools must be established. This paper aims to fill this gap by presenting an extended taxonomy of advanced information visualization and interaction in conceptual modeling. We present a generic taxonomy that is afterward contextualized within the specific domain of conceptual modeling. The taxonomy serves orientation in the vast developing field of information visualization and interaction and hopefully sparks innovation if future modeling tool development.

Keywords: Conceptual Modeling, Artificial Intelligence, Systematic Mapping Study
Astract: In conceptual modeling (CM), humans apply abstraction to represent excerpts of reality for means of understanding and communication, and processing by machines. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is applied to vast amounts of data to automatically identify patterns or classify entities. While CM produces comprehensible and explicit knowledge representations, the outcome of AI algorithms often lacks these qualities while being able to extract knowledge from large and unstructured representations. Recently, a trend toward intertwining CM and AI emerged. This systematic mapping study shows how this interdisciplinary research field is structured, which mutual benefits are gained by the intertwining, and future research directions.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence, DMN, Enterprise modeling, Explainable AI, Machine learning, Model-driven engineering
Astract: The Decision Model and Notation (DMN) modeling language allows the precise specification of business decisions and business rules. DMN is readily understandable by business users involved in decision management. However, as the models get complex, the cognitive abilities of humans threaten manual maintainability and comprehensibility. Proper design of the decision logic thus requires comprehensive automated analysis of e.g., all possible cases the decision shall cover; correlations between inputs and outputs; and the importance of inputs for deriving the output. In the paper, the authors explore the mutual benefits of combining human-driven DMN decision modeling with the computational power of Artificial Intelligence for DMN model analysis and improved comprehension. The authors propose a model-driven approach that uses DMN models to generate Machine Learning (ML) training data and show, how the trained ML models can inform human decision modelers by means of superimposing the feature importance within the original DMN models. An evaluation with multiple real DMN models from an insurance company evaluates the feasibility and the utility of the approach.