Month Year

February 2001

Issue: 18

Editor's Notes: ... Free VisioModeler!
by Scot A. Becker

An ORM metamodel of Information Engineering
by Dr. Terry Halpin

This article provides a basic ORM metamodel for the Information Engineering (IE) notation, one of the most popular notations in use for Entity-Relationship (ER) modeling. This article aims to clarify the IE notation for those familiar with ORM, and also to contribute towards efforts to provide transformation between the notations. There are many ways to metamodel IE, and the model discussed here is simply one suggestion.

Conceptual Data Modeling in an Object Oriented Process (Part One)
By Scot A. Becker

Object-Orientated (OO) software development processes (iterative and component driven) are being used more frequently in the industry. Each component iteration generally goes through the following phases: Analysis, Design, Construction, Verification, and Deployment. In an OO process, business rules tend to get captured during the analysis and design phases.

However, OO processes are neither formal nor rigorous; success is dependent on the skills and experience of the analysts and designers, as the resulting constraints are not easily verified. In addition, the OO class diagrams (from a data perspective) are inherently rooted at the logical level and not at the conceptual level. In this first installment, this paper discusses OO processes in more detail.

Natural Language Modeling
By Patrick Hallock

A visit to Dr. John Sharp and the Natural Modeling Class. This was a very interesting week of training and understanding some of the options used by various conceptual modelers. We all know John for his analysis problems and solutions in each edition of the journal, here is some background on how they are solved.

Practical Data Administration Part Two
By Daniel Roth

Daniel is keeping an eye on the job of data administrator. The proper perspective and understanding the users language versus the data managers language are discussed.

A System Level Testing Modeling Mechanism in a Reengineering Environment
By Dr. Kiran J. Fernandes, Dr. Vinesh H. Raja, and Mark Morley

This paper proposes a method of Built-In Test (BIT) for object-oriented applications. The advantage of this method is that the BITs in the software can be inherited and reused as code. Therefore building tests into the conventional software during object-oriented design can be a significant approach for the existing Object Oriented (OO) systems. The comprehension of this novel approach is explained via a rework example from British Aerospace Systems (BAe Systems) (SI 4410).

If You Wish to Change the World, Start with Yourself:
An Alternative Metaphor for Objects Interaction
By Ilia Bider and Dr. Maxim Khomyakov

During the past ten years, requirements on functionality of business applications have been slowly changing. This shift consists of moving from traditional command based applications to inherently interactive applications of workflow and groupware type. For modeling new kind of business applications, the authors suggest an approach to defining interaction that is not based on explicit communication. In this approach, interaction is realized via active relationships that can propagate changes from one object to another. Based on this idea, which comes from the previous research work of the authors, the paper discusses the issues of introducing "harnesses" on the interactive behavior, finding the right place for the end-users in the model, and modeling distribution of tasks between different users.

A New Automated Heuristics For Mapping NIAM ISDs Into Fifth Normal Form Tables
By Toufik Taibi

This paper is aimed to provide a detailed description of the notational and semantic aspects of NIAM's Information Structure Diagram (ISD). The ISD is the most natural way of modeling a Universe of Discourse (UoD) as it uses a carefully chosen subset of the language people use in their day to day interaction. Moreover, a tool has been developed (NIAM Mapper) to allow the drawing of ISDs, performing rigorous syntactic and semantic checking on them and mapping them into fifth normal form tables based on a new mapping heuristics.

Dr. John Sharp
Solution for Last Issue's Analysis Problem
Analysis Problem