Concept Modeling

It’s as if you’ve put the oven in the bathroom, and the shower in the kitchen — UX researcher, Dylan Mathiesen ^[1]

Quality of a model is relative the purpose of use

Information modeling types from ^[2]

• mental models, which represent users’ understanding of the interaction domain ^[3],
• conceptual models, which represent the concepts and actions systems must expose to users, so they can accomplish their goals, and ^{[4] [5]}
• implementation models, which represent how we will implement the system.

Conceptual models have roots in objects-oriented programming and modeling business domain to meet requirements. Maybe it is bad idea to do conceptual models in implementation level, but just stay in cognitive level.

The question to uncover is what is simple and for who?

Conceptual Models: Core to Good Design

Having a clear ontology and vocubulary that is focused on users coneptual model lets you write use cases using the domain-specific words from conceptual model, not using UI terms.

Intorduction to conceptual modeling

Part 1 Information modeling

Notes

Modeling is a abstract representation of the world - it throws away unnecessary information and shows information from certain point of view. Domain is the part of the world it represents. Framework is the formal, artificial languae that contains symbolic structures and semantics for building representations.

Data models include physical models, logical models and conceptual models. Physical models describe model of specific database. Logical model describes data in technology-specific way. Conceptual model is technology-independent.

Symbolic structures in a conceptual model include:

• Object, attributes & entities, instances and classess
• Represeing a domain: Schem & data.

Part 2 Building conceptual models

Part 3 Modelling practice

Part 4 From models to ontologies and back

General types of relations:

• Identification
• Classification
• Composition
• Participation
• Location
• Influence
• Reference

Resources