Abstract
In the literature, there are many proposals of quality properties of conceptual schemas, but only a few of them (mainly those related to syntax) have been integrated into the development environments used by professionals and students. A possible explanation of this unfortunate fact may be that the proposals have been defined in disparate ways, which makes it difficult to integrate them into those environments. In this paper we define quality properties in terms of quality issues, which essentially are conditions that should not happen, and we propose a unified method for their definition and treatment. We show that our method is able to define most of the existing quality properties in a uniform way and makes it possible to integrate quality issues into development environments. The method can be adapted to several languages. We present a prototype implementation of our method as an Eclipse plugin. We have evaluated the potential usefulness of our method by analyzing the presence of a set of quality issues in a set of conceptual schemas developed by students as part of their projects.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Olivé, A.: Conceptual Modeling of Information Systems. Springer (2007)
Lindland, O.I., Sindre, G., Sølvberg, A.: Understanding quality in conceptual modeling. IEEE Softw. 11(2), 42–49 (1994)
Maes, A., Poels, G.: Evaluating Quality of Conceptual Models Based on User Perceptions. In: Embley, D.W., Olivé, A., Ram, S. (eds.) ER 2006. LNCS, vol. 4215, pp. 54–67. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Ambler, S.W.: The Elements of UML 2.0 Style. Cambridge University Press (2005)
Becker, J., Delfmann, P., Herwig, S., Lis, Ł., Stein, A.: Formalizing Linguistic Conventions for Conceptual Models. In: Laender, A.H.F., Castano, S., Dayal, U., Casati, F., de Oliveira, J.P.M. (eds.) ER 2009. LNCS, vol. 5829, pp. 70–83. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Chen, P.: English sentence structure and entity-relationship diagrams. Inf. Sci. (2-3), 127–149 (1983)
Costal, D., Gómez, C.: On the Use of Association Redefinition in UML Class Diagrams. In: Embley, D.W., Olivé, A., Ram, S. (eds.) ER 2006. LNCS, vol. 4215, pp. 513–527. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Costal, D., Gómez, C., Queralt, A., Raventós, R., Teniente, E.: Facilitating the Definition of General Constraints in UML. In: Wang, J., Whittle, J., Harel, D., Reggio, G. (eds.) MoDELS 2006. LNCS, vol. 4199, pp. 260–274. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Deissenboeck, F., Pizka, M.: Concise and consistent naming. Softw. Qual. Control, 261–282 (2006)
Fowler, M.: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code. Addison-Wesley (1999)
Cherfi, S.S.S., Comyn-Wattiau, I., Akoka, J.: Quality Patterns for Conceptual Modelling. In: Li, Q., Spaccapietra, S., Yu, E., Olivé, A. (eds.) ER 2008. LNCS, vol. 5231, pp. 142–153. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Wohed, P.: Tool Support for Reuse of Analysis Patterns - A Case Study. In: Laender, A.H.F., Liddle, S.W., Storey, V.C. (eds.) ER 2000. LNCS, vol. 1920, pp. 196–209. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Hevner, A.R., March, S.T., Park, J., Ram, S.: Design science in information systems research. MIS Quarterly (1), 75–105 (2004)
Eclipse Foundation: Eclipse project, http://www.eclipse.org
Aguilera, D., Gómez, C., Olivé, A.: Issue catalog, http://helios.lsi.upc.edu/phd/catalog/issues.php
Barker, R.: CASE Method: Entity Relationship Modelling, 1st edn. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing (1990)
Embley, D.W., Kurtz, B., Woodfield, S.: Object-Oriented Systems Analysis: A Model-Driven Approach. Yourdon Press (1992)
Meyer, B.: Reusable Software: the Base object-oriented component libraries. Prentice-Hall (1994)
Tort, A., Olivé, A., Sancho, M.-R.: The CSTL Processor: A Tool for Automated Conceptual Schema Testing. In: De Troyer, O., Bauzer Medeiros, C., Billen, R., Hallot, P., Simitsis, A., Van Mingroot, H. (eds.) ER Workshops 2011. LNCS, vol. 6999, pp. 349–352. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Blanc, X., Mougenot, A., Mounier, I., Mens, T.: Incremental Detection of Model Inconsistencies Based on Model Operations. In: van Eck, P., Gordijn, J., Wieringa, R. (eds.) CAiSE 2009. LNCS, vol. 5565, pp. 32–46. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Egyed, A.: Instant consistency checking for the UML. In: ICSE Proceedings, pp. 381–390. ACM (2006)
Boger, M., Sturm, T., Fragemann, P.: Refactoring Browser for UML. In: Aksit, M., Awasthi, P., Unland, R. (eds.) NODe 2002. LNCS, vol. 2591, pp. 366–377. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
ArgoUML: ArgoUML, http://argouml.tigris.org
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Aguilera, D., Gómez, C., Olivé, A. (2012). A Method for the Definition and Treatment of Conceptual Schema Quality Issues. In: Atzeni, P., Cheung, D., Ram, S. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7532. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34002-4_39
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-34002-4_39
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-34001-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-34002-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)