Author's personal copy
http://java.sun.com – Java Technology.
i
decide what temporal, spatial, and structural resolutions
are needed for our study to reach the goal. Reciprocally,
gress and on the external conditions that may be changing
rates of the main processes that we are to model and
decide for how long we want to observe the system. If
Ecological Models | Conceptual Diagrams and Flow Diagrams 731the conceptual model becomes important in part to define
the goal. In many cases the goal of the study is quite
vague, and it is only after the conceptual model is created
that the goals of modeling can become clear. Modeling is
an essentially iterative process. We cannot prescribe a
sequence of steps that takes us to the goal. It is an adaptive
process when many times the target is adjusted andtual model. A conceptual model is a qualitative
description of the system. A good conceptual model is
half the modeling effort. To create a conceptual model we
need to study the system and collect as much information
as possible about the system itself, and about similar
systems studied elsewhere. When creating a conceptual
model we start with the goal of the study and then try to
explain the system that we study in terms that would
match the goal. In designing the conceptual model we there is little change registered over the study period, the
model may not need to be dynamic. It may be static and
focus on other aspects of the system. If temporal change is
important, we need to identify how this change occurs. In
reality, time is continuous. However, in some cases it may
be useful to think of time as discrete and describe the
system using the event-based formalism.
We should start thinking about the appropriate resolu-
tion of our temporal model. This resolution is dictated by
the goal, which tells us how often we need to update theTemporal Domain
In the temporal domain we first figure out the specificIn most cases the modeling process starts with a concep- the scope of the study. Building a good conceptual model
is an important step on this path.Spatial Domain
Structural Domain
Further Reading
Introduction moved as we go, depending both on our modeling pro-ª 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Temporal DomainModeling Software
ConclusionsA A Voinov, Chesapeake Research Consortium and Johns Hopkins University, Edgewater, MD, USAapplications involving large databases, where input and
output are the primary concerns, SQL should be consid-
ered, and SQL programs can easily be integrated into
other types of programs. For applications that require
rapid development, a package that uses scripting language
may be the best choice.
See also: Bayesian Networks; Data Mining.
Further Reading
Goldin D and Wegner P (2005) The Church-Turing thesis: Breaking the
myth. In: Cooper BS and Lo¨we B (eds.) New Computational
Paradigms. First Conference on Computability in Europe,
pp. 152–168. Amsterdam: CiE.
Horstmann CS (2001) Big Java. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Kernighan BW and Pike R (1999) The Practice of Programming.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Kernighan BW and Ritchie DM (1988) The C Programming Language,
2nd edn. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Conceptual Diagrams and Flow D agramsKing KNC (1996) Programming: A Modern Approach. New York:
Norton.
Knuth DE (1997) The Art of Computer Programming, 3rd edn. Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley.
Lerdorf RJ and Tatroe K (2002) Programming PHP. Sebastopol, CA:
O’Reilly and Associates.
Lutz M (1996) Programming Python. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly and
Associates.
Mitchell JC (2003) Concepts in Programming Languages. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Molina H, Ullman J, and Widom J (2002) Database Systems: The
Complete Book. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Wall L and Schwartz RL (2001) Programming Perl. Sebastopol, CA:
O’Reilly and Associates.
Relevant Websites
http://www.its.strath.ac.uk – C Programming, IT Services,
University of Strathclyde.