Comparing traditional conceptual modeling with ontology-driven conceptual modeling: An empirical study

Abstract

This paper conducts an empirical study that explores the differences between adopting a traditional conceptual modeling (TCM) technique and an ontology-driven conceptual modeling (ODCM) technique with the objective to understand and identify in which modeling situations an ODCM technique can prove beneficial compared to a TCM technique. More specifically, we asked ourselves if there exist any meaningful differences in the resulting conceptual model and the effort spent to create such model between novice modelers trained in an ontologydriven conceptual modeling technique and novice modelers trained in a traditional conceptual modeling technique. To answer this question, we discuss previous empirical research efforts and distill these efforts into two hypotheses. Next, these hypotheses are tested in a rigorously developed experiment, where a total of 100 students from two different Universities participated. The findings of our empirical study confirm that there do exist meaningful differences between adopting the two techniques. We observed that novice modelers applying the ODCM technique arrived at higher quality models compared to novice modelers applying the TCM technique. More specifically, the results of the empirical study demonstrated that it is advantageous to apply an ODCM technique over an TCM when having to model the more challenging and advanced facets of a certain domain or scenario. Moreover, we also did not find any significant difference in effort between applying these two techniques. Finally, we specified our results in three findings that aim to clarify the obtained results.

An ontology for sharing and managing information in disaster response: An illustrative case study of flood evacuation

“…In order to represent the endurant ontology, in this paper, the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) by [12] is selected as it is a well-founded philosophically foundational ontology and has been widely used in developing domain ontologies in a variety of domains [36,37]. In particular, UFO combines DOLCE and BWW foundational ontologies, which extends the endurant ontology by articulating the concept of class into a system of kinds of classes, including Kind, Subkind, Category, Phase, Role and so on.…”

Ontology-based Data Management Tool for Studying Radon Concentration

“…The proposed solution is based on ViewOnto, a web ontology which was defined for the formal description of the semantics of data views in different scenarios [10,11]. Many domain ontologies have been created until now [11,14,17] but ViewOnto is the only one with this purpose of those available in the consulted literature. In this work, this ontology is taken into the dimensions of space and time.…”

Ontology-Based Model Abstraction

“…ODCM approaches have enjoyed an increasing adoption by the Conceptual Modeling community as a number of independent results consistently show their benefits for improving the quality of conceptual models [3], [21], [28]. An example of an ODCM language is OntoUML [12].…”

“…Moreover, empirical evidence shows that OntoUML significantly contributes to improving the quality of conceptual models without requiring an additional effort to produce them. For instance, the work of [28] reports on a modeling experiment conducted with 100 participants in two countries showing the advantages (in these respects) of OntoUML when compared to a classical conceptual modeling language (EER).…”