The Essence of Conceptual Models
Models are the basic human tools for managing complexity and understanding. In the context of digital transformation, modeling plays a central role in ensuring the functionality, security and quality of complex digital ecosystems and enter-prise digital twins. Many modeling paradigms have evolved over time in different disciplines, resulting in a wide variety of modeling languages, methods and tools that have come and gone. This is particularly true for informatics, which is a modeling discipline in it-self: for long it has systematized the field of mod-eling, for example by introducing model hierar-chies, by ontological foundations, by developing universal modeling languages such as UML, or by specifying domain-specific modeling methods (DSSMs) for areas of application where universal approaches fail. A core modeling method in Informatics is that of Conceptual Modeling. In this talk we aim at a bet-ter understanding of the essence of this method. For that purpose, we address the “anatomy” of conceptual models and show how they can be characterized by a signature. We combine this with a transparent explanation of the nature of conceptual models as the link between the dimen-sion of linguistic terms and the encyclopedic or ontological dimension of notions: Figuratively this leads to the triptych of conceptual modeling. Building on this, we show how digital ecosystems can be designed and developed in a rigorous mod-el-centered approach. This is illustrated by the results of projects we have carried out in the areas of assistance systems and the development of mechatronic systems.
Lecture at NEMO2022
Date/Time: Thursday, July 14, 2022 at 09:00