Abstract
Conceptualization development is central in modeling language design. As one of their first design steps, language designers need to decide on a set of concepts on which the language will be based and which can be understood and used by a population of modelers for characterizing and representing relevant domain information. Thus, exposing candidate concept sets to future users may offer insights on how well the concepts of choice are understood and distinguished from each other by those who will be called to actually use the language. We propose an empirical measurement framework to allow just that. The framework consists of an instrumentation approach whereby participants sampled from the user population classify domain expressions to the corresponding concepts, and a set of measurement constructs for translating participant observed data into design insights. A small case study is conducted to explore the feasibility and limitations of the proposed approach.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Alothman, Norah., Zhian, Mehrnaz, Liaskos, Sotirios: User perception of numeric contribution semantics for goal models: an exploratory experiment. In: Mayr, Heinrich C., Guizzardi, Giancarlo, Ma, Hui, Pastor, Oscar (eds.) ER 2017. LNCS, vol. 10650, pp. 451–465. Springer, Cham (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69904-2_34
Amyot, D., Mussbacher, G.: User requirements notation: the first ten years, the next ten years (Invited Paper). J. Software 6(5), 747–768 (2011)
Bernabé, César Henrique., Silva Souza, VÃtor E., Almeida Falbo, Ricardo de., Guizzardi, Renata S.S., Silva, Carla: GORO 2.0: evolving an ontology for goal-oriented requirements engineering. In: Guizzardi, Giancarlo, Gailly, Frederik, Suzana Pitangueira Maciel, Rita (eds.) ER 2019. LNCS, vol. 11787, pp. 169–179. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34146-6_15
Bork, D., Karagiannis, D., Pittl, B.: How are metamodels specified in practice? empirical insights and recommendations. In: Proceedings of the 24th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2018). New Orleans, LA (2018)
Caire, P., Genon, N., Heymans, P., Moody, D.L.: Visual notation design 2.0: towards user comprehensible requirements engineering notations. In: Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE 2013), pp. 115–124 (2013)
Cracau, D., Lima, J.E.D.: On the normalized herfindahl-hirschman index: a technical note. Int. J. Food Syst. Dyn. 4(7), 382–386 (2016)
Crump, M.J.C., McDonnell, J.V., Gureckis, T.M.: Evaluating Amazon’s mechanical turk as a tool for experimental behavioral research. PLoS ONE 8(3), e57410 (2013)
Cruz-Lemus, J.A., Genero, M., Manso, M.E., Morasca, S., Piattini, M.: Assessing the understandability of UML statechart diagrams with composite states–a family of empirical studies. Empirical Software Eng. 14(6), 685–719 (2009)
Dalpiaz, F., Franch, X., Horkoff, J.: iStar 2.0 Language Guide. The Computing Research Repository (CoRR) (2016). http://arxiv.org/abs/1605.07767
Dardenne, A., van Lamsweerde, A., Fickas, S.: Goal-directed requirements acquisition. Sci. Comput. Program. 20, 3–50 (1993)
Estrada, H., Rebollar, A.M., Pastor, O., Mylopoulos, J.: An empirical evaluation of the i* framework in a model-based software generation environment. In: Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2006), pp. 513–527. Luxembourg (2006)
Guizzardi, G.: Ontological foundations for structural conceptual models. Ph.D. thesis, University of Twente (2005)
Hadar, I., Reinhartz-Berger, I., Kuflik, T., Perini, A., Ricca, F., Susi, A.: Comparing the comprehensibility of requirements models expressed in Use Case and Tropos: results from a family of experiments. Inf. Software Technol. 55(10), 1823–1843 (2013)
Henderson-Sellers, B., Gonzalez-Perez, C.: Granularity in conceptual modelling: application to metamodels. In: Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2010), pp. 219–232. Vancouver, Canada (2010)
Horkoff, Jennifer, Yu, Eric: Finding solutions in goal models: an interactive backward reasoning approach. In: Parsons, Jeffrey, Saeki, Motoshi, Shoval, Peretz, Woo, Carson, Wand, Yair (eds.) ER 2010. LNCS, vol. 6412, pp. 59–75. Springer, Heidelberg (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16373-9_5
Houy, C., Fettke, P., Loos, P.: Understanding understandability of conceptual models - What are we actually talking about? In: Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2012), pp. 64–77. Florence, Italy (2012)
Karagiannis, D., Khün, H.: Metamodelling platforms. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on E-commerce and Web Technology, pp. 182–197. France (2002)
Krippendorff, K.: Content Analysis: An Introduction to its Methodology. SAGE (2004)
Krogstie, J.: Model-Based Development and Evolution of Information Systems: A Quality Approach. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-2936-3
Liaskos, S., Dundjerovic, T., Gabriel, G.: Comparing alternative goal model visualizations for decision making: an exploratory experiment. In: Proceedings of the 33rd ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2018). pp. 1272–1281. PAU, France (2018)
Liaskos, S., Ronse, A., Zhian, M.: Assessing the intuitiveness of qualitative contribution relationships in goal models: an exploratory experiment. In: Proceedings of the 11th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2017), pp. 466–471. Toronto, Ontario (2017)
Liaskos, Sotirios, Tambosi, Wisal: Factors affecting comprehension of contribution links in goal models: an experiment. In: Laender, Alberto H.F., Pernici, Barbara, Lim, Ee-Peng, de Oliveira, José Palazzo M. (eds.) ER 2019. LNCS, vol. 11788, pp. 525–539. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33223-5_43
Lindland, O.I., Sindre, G., Solvberg, A.: Understanding quality in conceptual modeling. IEEE Software 11(2), 42–49 (1994)
Mendling, J., Strembeck, M.: Influence factors of understanding business process models. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Business Information Systems, pp. 142–153. Innsbruck, Austria (2008)
Nelson, H.J., Poels, G., Genero, M., Piattini, M.: A conceptual modeling quality framework. Softw. Quality J. 20, 201–228 (2012)
Olivé, A.: Conceptual Modeling of Information Systems. Springer, Heidelberg (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-72677-7
Santos, M., Gralha, C., Goulão, M., Araújo, J.: Increasing the semantic transparency of the KAOS goal model concrete syntax. In: Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2018), pp. 424–439. Xi’an, China (2018)
Stoet, G.: PsyToolkit: a software package for programming psychological experiments using Linux. Behav. Res. Methods 42(4), 1096–1104 (2010)
Stoet, G.: PsyToolkit: a novel web-based method for running online questionnaires and reaction-time experiments. Teach. Psych. 44(1), 24–31 (2017)
Susi, A., Perini, A., Mylopoulos, J.: The tropos metamodel and its use. Informatica 29, 401–408 (2005)
The Open Group: ArchiMate® 3.1 Specification. Technical report (2019)
Wand, Y., Weber, R.: On the ontological expressiveness of information systems analysis and design grammars. Inf. Syst. J. 3(4), 217–237 (1993)
Yu, E.S.K.: Towards modelling and reasoning support for early-phase requirements engineering. In: Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering (RE 1997). pp. 226–235. Annapolis, MD (1997)
Yu, E.S.: GRL - Goal-oriented Requirement Language. http://www.cs.toronto.edu/km/GRL/
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Liaskos, S., Jaouhar, I. (2020). Towards a Framework for Empirical Measurement of Conceptualization Qualities. In: Dobbie, G., Frank, U., Kappel, G., Liddle, S.W., Mayr, H.C. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12400. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62522-1_38
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62522-1_38
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-62521-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-62522-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)