Conceptual modeling for systems integration

Abstract

Conceptual modeling for systems integration is challenging because of two reasons. First, it must deal with a universe of discourse that includes human creations: software applications and interactions among them. Second, the knowledge needed to create appropriate conceptual models must be obtained from several users who can only possess partial views. The constructs and methods employed for conceptual modeling for systems integration should, therefore, facilitate representation as well as combination of partial knowledge captured from multiple organizational participants. We present an overview of an approach named systems integration requirements engineering (SIRE) to address this set of challenges. The approach includes a set of modeling constructs and an associated method that allows generating and then merging local conceptual models for systems integration. The paper presents formal descriptions of the constructs, a method for developing individual model fragments, an results from an initial empirical evaluation that compares our proposals against a benchmark provided by UML communication diagrams. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.