News and Events
We got the best paper award at The 28th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER’09)! Lars Rönnbäck who presented the paper is shown above receiving the award.
Anchor Modeling – An Agile Modeling Technique using the Sixth Normal Form for Structurally and Temporally Evolving Data
By: Olle Regardt, Lars Rönnbäck, Maria Bergholtz, Paul Johannesson, Petia Wohed (Affecto and DSV, SU/KTH, Sweden)
This week Hans Weigand and his PhD student Jeewani Jayasinghe from Tilburg University visited us for doing research on value based service modeling. We discussed the relationships between web services and “real” services and how conflicts can be detected when combining services. Hans also gave a presentation on value encounters as a means for capturing the logic of co-creation of value.
The first workshop on Value Modeling and Business Ontologies (VMBO) was arranged by SYSLAB and took place in February in Kista. The second VMBO workshop will take place in Amsterdam on Dec 21 – 22 2009.
From the Call of Papers:
The importance of modeling the essence of enterprises on a level that abstracts from business process details is increasingly recognized. Two recognized approaches are value modeling and REA. The REA (Resources, Events and Agents) model originating from the accounting domain is maturing to a conceptual framework and ontology for Enterprise Information Architectures in general. Value modeling is a business modeling approach that focuses on the value objects exchanged in business networks and that is supported by the e3-value tool set.
Jannecke Schulman at the ICT School of KTH in Kista has published an interview with me. A short excerpt:
“Progress is being driven by teenagers!”
Professor Paul Johannesson makes this comment about developments in the realm of information technology with a slight hint of irony. What he is referring to is the breakneck pace of developments in social media, such as Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. This will have an impact on the development of business management systems in professional life too. Paul conducts research in all kinds of modelling – especially business management systems, with a specialist interest in information technology services.
Erik Perjons and I have written an article on value modeling in healthcare, which was published in Healthcare IT Management, which is the official journal of the European Association of Healthcare IT Managers. The journal has a wide audience and is distributed in about 30,000 copies.
Abstract
Politicians, health care managers, and systems designers need new instruments for managing the complexity of today’s health care systems. One of the most promising instruments is a recent enterprise modelling technique called value models. A value model is a graphical representation of a network of cooperating actors that together create value through resource exchanges and transformations. Value models have their origin in commercial contexts, where they have been used for analysing the economic viability of networks and their participants. Value models can be extended to cater for the special requirements of health care networks, thereby facilitating the design of new forms of collaboration in healthcare as well as innovative health care services.
There is a new international journal, which is most relevant for information systems engineering including enterprise modeling, the International Journal of Information System Modeling and Design. The editor in chief is Remigijus Gustas at Karlstad University, who also worked at SYSLAB a few years ago. I have a role as associate editor of the journal.
“The International Journal of Information System Modeling and Design (IJISMD) publishes original research on the advances of modeling methods in system analysis and design. IJISMD promotes enterprise modeling which is bridging the communication gap among business managers and system designers. This journal examines the theoretical foundations of new generation graphical design methods, models, and tools to facilitate reasoning on compositions of systems and services across organizational and technical system boundaries.” (from the home page of the journal)
Lars Rönnbäck, Olle Regardt, Maria, Petia, and I have written a paper on a novel approach to database modeling, called anchor modeling. Lars and Olle, who work at Affecto, have developed this approach for some years now and they have applied it in several industrial projects. In the paper, we formalised, assessed, and evaluated anchor modeling. The paper was accepted at ER 2009.
Abstract
Maintaining and evolving data warehouses is a complex, error prone, and time consuming activity. The main reason for this state of affairs is that the environment of a data warehouse is in constant change, while the warehouse itself needs to provide a stable and consistent interface to information spanning extended periods of time. In this paper, we propose a modeling technique for data warehousing, called anchor modeling, that offers non-destructive extensibility mechanisms, thereby enabling robust and flexible management of changes in source systems. A key benefit of anchor modeling is that changes in a data warehouse environment only require extensions, not modifications, to the data warehouse. This ensures that existing data warehouse applications will remain unaffected by the evolution of the data warehouse, i.e. existing views and functions will not have to be modified as a result of changes in the warehouse model.
A new group on research methodology has been started by Danny Brash. The first posts address the role of theories in information systems research, the differences between behavioural sciences and design sciences, the relationships between research paradigms and research methods, the difference between “Information Systems” and “Business Informatics”, and much more. Please add your own comments, upload papers, and link to other sites.