Formal Aspects of Enterprise Modeling Methods: A Comparison Framework

Abstract

For the design of work and knowledge systems it is today common to revert to enterprise modeling methods. These methods not only support the representation and analysis of complex interactions between technical services and human actors. The resulting models also provide value through acting as knowledge bases themselves. Thereby, the formalization of modeling methods is essential to unambiguously define their structure, behavior, and semantics, and enable an intersubjective understanding and machine-processability.In this paper we analyze and compare six common enterprise modeling methods in regard to the formalization of their process-related aspects. From this comparison we derive implications for choosing an appropriate method when designing work and knowledge systems.

From Expert Discipline to Common Practice: A Vision and Research Agenda for Extending the Reach of Enterprise Modeling

“…Future EM tools should rely on interaction and interface paradigms that represent the standard in office environments, e.g., browser-based applications today and in the future deviceless interaction. The locally-adapted model representation formats and languages could be enriched for enabling machine-based analyses (Bork and Fill 2014). This can either be accomplished through traditional adaptations of a modeling language or through semantic annotations.…”

Towards an Agile and Ontology-Aided Modeling Environment for DSML Adaptation

“…3), its formalization and validation should occur automatically. According to Bork and Fill in [4] a formal specification is necessary to provide unambiguous understanding of models and to foster the interoperability between different computer systems. The same can be applied to modeling languages with the advantage that a formal specification of a modeling language can be automatically propagated on models.…”

“…3. Conceptualization of the Agile and Ontology-aided Modeling Environment ontology 4 . Concepts in the Domain Ontology represent the semantics of language constructs, which intends to be independent from a particular modeling language.…”

“…This complexity mainly resides on the lack of development support, i.e. scarce availability of guidelines and best practices [4] as well as the required domain expertise that the knowledge engineer (i.e. developer of the modeling language) should have but rarely has [5].…”

A Comparative Analysis of Selected Enterprise Modeling Approaches

“…More specifically, in [19], a particular framework for evaluating object-oriented modeling methods is presented. In [20], an evaluation technique is presented that builds on computing metrics for language specifications.…”