A unifying framework for the definition of syntactic measures over conceptual schema diagrams (extended version)

There are many approaches that propose the use of measures for assessing the quality of conceptual schemas. Many of these measures focus purely on the syntactic aspects of the conceptual schema diagrams, e.g. their size, their shape, etc. Similarities among different measures may be found both at th...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Costal Costa, Dolors|||0000-0002-7340-0414, Franch Gutiérrez, Javier|||0000-0001-9733-8830
Format: report
Publication Date:2011
Country:España
Institution:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repository:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/13059
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/13059
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:System design
System analysis
Conceptual structures (Information theory)
Conceptual schema measure
Conceptual schema diagram
Metamodelling
MOF
Disseny de sistemes
Anàlisi de sistemes
Estructures conceptuals (Teoria de la informació)
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Enginyeria del software
Description
Summary:There are many approaches that propose the use of measures for assessing the quality of conceptual schemas. Many of these measures focus purely on the syntactic aspects of the conceptual schema diagrams, e.g. their size, their shape, etc. Similarities among different measures may be found both at the intra-model level (i.e., several measures over the same type of diagram are defined following the same layout) and at the inter-model level (i.e., measures over different types of diagrams are similar considering an appropriate metaschema correspondence). In this paper we analyse these similarities for a particular family of diagrams used in conceptual modelling, those that can be ultimately seen as a combination of nodes and edges of different types. We propose a unifying measuring framework for this family and illustrate its application on a particular type, namely business process diagrams.