Month Year Issue

January 2002 Issue: 23

Journal of Conceptual Modeling
www.inconcept.com/jcm

Editor's Corner
by Patrick Hallock

DevDays 2001 - November 6

Microsoft had it's big Studio .Net presentations this November. In the general session there was a short introduction to the set of visual modeling tools coming out in February 2002. The newer version of object role modeling was part of that demonstration. For a general session this presentation was quite good. However, the one hour break out session for visual modeling was not nearly as good for conceptual modeling. I should note that the UML modeling was a different break out session. The ORM material was very simple and did not provide an adequate demonstration. Here in the twin cities Necito and I were lucky to make the presentation, but we also highly modified the content. It was a last minute change, since we thought we had to present the material as given. However, the local office told us to use our experience and make it better. One hour is very little presentation time. We had to reduce the talking time and increase the demonstration time. Some of the other sites for DevDays were also lucky, since they used John Miller or Bill Mclean - two very experienced ORM consultants. After reading the demo and making the presentation, we have been working on a PowerPoint presentation with multimedia to present ORM within a one-hour timeframe.

Journal of Conceptual Modeling

This issue is a major change for the InConcept site and the JCM. We have changed the colors, fonts and frame behavior to help make the site easier to read. Sizing the width of the pages has changed to be any width the user desires. Printing is merely a matter of printing the article frame by using your browser's print options. Not all of the back issues have been converted, so they are in the old format. They will be converted between issues. Please contract me with any issues with the site. Sure, it is fair to complain about colors, layout or anything else. Since we are in a changing mood - take advantage of it. All suggestions will be read - some will be acted upon. Send to path@inconcept.com

Conceptual Modeling Future

The new version of Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect edition is now available to MSDN Universal Subscribers as a direct download from the MSDN download page.

The new Studio .NET is expected in February of 2002. If you read Terry Halpin's articles you are getting a feeling for the new tool set. It is this edition that will go forward for the next year or two.

Hint: Since this version is still very Visio oriented, remember you can create custom properties for any shape. You can add additional information of any shape on the fly. If you need an approval date and approval person for an object - just add custom properties via the usual Visio technique.

The new version of Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect edition is now available to MSDN universal subscribers as a direct download from the MSDN download page.

Local News

Dr. Gordon Everest, UM Carlson School of Business gave two presentations of "What is wrong with ER?". One was a seminar at the university and the other was the local DAMA chapter. The presentation included a quiz on normalization determination in the E/R approach. This went as poorly as Gordon expected. The obvious remedy is to use conceptual modeling. Domains, relations and normalization all all much easier, almost invisible to the the modeler and the domain expert. His class in modeling which includes ORM is offered again this school year - next semester. The class size has been growing and the class exercises are substantial.

Thanks to Ken North for pointing this out - a friend of ORM

UML advocates got an even sharper shock when one of the key developers of HR-XML spoke at length about the inability of UML to meet the needs of a large-scale human resources systems project undertaken by the U.S. Department of Defense. Enrique Kortright, of the U.S. Navy Space and Warfare Command's Information Technology Center, discussed how the initial modeling of the planned Defense Integrated Human Resources System (DIMHRS) ran into problems using UML. This project is a large, complex undertaking, eventually serving 3 to 4 million employees, with thousands of entry points and concurrent users, and exchanging data with finance, education, health care, retirement, and civilian personnel systems.

Kortright said the goal of modeling this system was to capture the business knowledge of human resource professionals, and like Bob Sutor of IBM, he had to evaluate the available standards against the needs of that project. However, he found UML limited in its ability to record complex business behavior. Based on this experience, he said UML was both too complex and too restrictive and forced the modelers to make decisions irrelevant to the overall goals of the project, such as classifying professional human resources knowledge between classes and attributes. Kortright also discovered that human resources experts could not understand the UML notation. The DIMHRS designers ended up using another graphical modeling language called Object Role Modeling, which like UML uses a graphical notation but is more expressive.
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/12/12/kotok.html?page=2

Visio Web Reader Download

Microsoft has provided a web reader for Visio drawing. This can be downloaded for free and used to send drawings to anyone else. The drawing is launched in your browser and you get a full sized rendering. The reader also exposes custom properties for the shapes. Next issue we are going to try putting a couple of Visio drawings into the JCM, those of you that have the reader can try this out. The reader is not limited to ORM drawings, but any Visio drawing. An article that has a small model, spaces in the document is limited, could have a link to the full-sized drawing directly from the .vsd file. The reader can be downloaded from (here).

Patrick Hallock is a Senior Partner and Principal Consultant for InConcept. He has over 20 years of ORM/NIAM experience and is a certified ORM consultant, trainer/train the trainer and a certified Visio trainer.

Contact Information:

Patrick Hallock
President and Co-Founder
InConcept
8171 Hidden Bay Trail N
Lake Elmo, MN 55042
path@inconcept.com
(651) 777-8484
fax: (651) 777-9634
http://www.inconcept.com