This excellent overview was contributed by Woody Pidcock of the Boeing company. Many organizations and companies are struggling with these terms and the ideas behind them; this set of definitions will help to clarify.

My simple “mental model” of what an information model is has the following scope and focus:

• Scope: Three levels of information abstraction:
• Model Constructs: A pre-defined set of graphical notations and rules of composition for representing models, referred to as a "Metamodel" in the Simple Model (SM1) shown below.
• Models: An explicit representation of one or more collections of information constructed using the pre-defined graphical notations and rules of composition.
• Model Instances: Objects of interest in the collection of information being modeled , referred to as a "Thing" in SM1 below.
• Focus: The semantic concepts represented in information models
• Entity: A type of information, represented as a rectangle with the name of the Entity as text within the rectangle
• Relationship: An association that may exist between instances of Entities, represented as an arrow, with the description text of the relationship read from the source Entity (at the arrow tail) to the destination Entity (at the arrow head).
• Subtype Partition: A partitioning of an Entity into subtypes, represented as a hierarchical upside-down tree structure, where each partition has its own name and is represented by a separate rectangle, with the constraint that every instance of the partition (Subtype Entity) is also an instance of the whole (Supertype Entity).

Figure 1a represents my simple mental model for information models. Let’s call it SM1.

Figure 1a Simple Mental Model (SM1) for Information Models

Here are the Model Constructs for SM1:

The subtype partition construct can be used to explicitly model these Model Constructs in SM1, as shown in Figure 1b:

Figure 1b SM1 with Model Constructs as subtype partitioning of Metamodel

It is important to note that the SM1 model in Figure 1 has a Scope and Focus that is self referencing. It is actually a model of its metamodel. It is also an instance of the Model entity within it!

The SM1 model has six entities:

• Metamodel
• Model
• Thing
• Entity
• Relationship
• Subtype Partition

The SM1 model has two relationships:

• Provides Focus For
• Provides Scope For

The SM1 model has one subtype partitioning:

• Metamodel = Entity + Relationship + Subtype Partition

When SM1 is viewed as the model of its metamodel, the three lists above become instances of the “Entity” entity, the “Relationship” entity, and the “Subtype Partition” entity respectively. These are all instances of the “Metamodel” entity. These Metamodel instances provide the focus for the SM1 model.

SM1 is only one of many possible instances of the Model entity in the SM1 model. However, all instances of the Model entity in SM1 share the same Metamodel focus (i.e., share the same set of graphical notations used in constructing SM1).

The Scope (instances of the “Thing” entity) that can be modeled is wide open and only limited by human imagination, which I imagine is unlimited.

In an e-mail conversation with Allen Jones, a colleague at The Boeing Company, I was asked to comment on a concise definition for the word "Ontology".

Here is trhe definition that Allen provided (paraphrased from a MITRE definition provided by Eric Dabbaghchi): "For a given domain, an ontology defines a vocabulary and the meaning of that vocabulary." This is a reasonable human parseable definition.

However, as always, the devil is in the details. The undefined term in the definition above (which typically no two people define the same way) is the word 'meaning'. Meaning is almost a synonym for ontology. To be precise, an ontology usually has a more global connotation than meaning, and is frequently represented via formal "models" that encode the relationships between the terms in a vocabulary. However, the phrase "meaning of that vocabulary" in the definition above could arguably be stated as the "ontology of that vocabulary", which would make the definition circular.

I assert that two of the terms in the vocabulary for the ontology domain are the words "ontology" and "meaning". To provide a useful ontology for the ontology domain, we need to provide meaning (definitions) for both words. So what definition can we use for "meaning" that will move this forward?

There are different schools of thought regarding whether or not "semantics" (AKA meaning) can be represented structurally in models. This is what an ontology attempts. I believe it is possible, but in my experience most modelers substitute short-cuts that use character string labels that humans can parse (assign meaning to) instead of including the voluminous explicit structural relationships needed to encode meaning as a by product of all the associations to related terms.

Based on my years of experience contemplating this philosophical question, here is what I propose: "In an ontology, the meaning of a term in its vocabulary is no more and no less than the concatenation of all the term's associations with other terms in the ontology's vocabulary."

Feel free to share this with your colleagues. Link to this site if you need to quote an "official" source for this definition.

Call for Papers
---------------

KISS Workshop on Fundamental Aspects of DSL Interoperability
http://www.industrialized-software.org/kiss-aswec-2009

Gold Coast, Australia, 14 April, 2009

Held in conjunction with ASWEC 2009
http://aswec2009.itee.uq.edu.au/

Related KISS workshops
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 8 June 2009 @ CAiSE 2009
http://www.industrialized-software.org/kiss-caise-2009
Cambridge, United Kingdom, 16 June 2009 @ Code Generation 2009
http://www.industrialized-software.org/kiss-cg-2009

Background and Aims
-------------------

The main motivation for the use of a DSL is the desire to express
problems in a compact form that reflects the natural terminology
of human domain experts, and that is easily accessible to software
tools. In short, DSLs are raising the level of abstraction of
software specifications and of knowledge representation in general.
When DSLs are used to formalize the results of domain analysis,
the result is a clean separation of concerns in the problem space.
The value of a DSL increases with the intuitiveness of the concrete
syntax. Visual and graphical elements may be needed to increase
usability, and often such languages are referred to as domain
specific modelling languages (DSML).

The level of interoperability between current DSL tools is
comparable to the level of interoperability between CASE tools
in the 90s. To increase the popularity of DSL based approaches,
this needs to change. With the extensive use of outsourcing and
with the increasing investment in open-source software, software
development has become highly decentralized, and an assumption
that all parties in a global software supply chain will use
identical tooling is simply not realistic. As a result today's
software supply chains are much less automated than supply chains
in other, more mature industries.

In order to increase awareness about the role that domain specific
modeling languages can play in capturing, preserving, and exploiting
knowledge in virtually all industries, it is necessary to establish
a strong consensus on the fundamental values and principles that
underpin the use of domain specific modeling languages.

KISS aims to provide guidelines to support the use of domain specific
methods and technologies in industry. In particular, KISS will
support the construction of tool-chains that are built by third
parties using components consisting of a mixture of commercial and
open-source DSL tools.

The KISS series of conference workshops and related events is used
to incrementally create a consensus that can be expressed in a form
similar to the agile manifesto and the fundamental agile principles.

Objectives
----------

1. To achieve a strong consensus on fundamental values and principles
for designing and using Domain Specific Languages.

2. To progress towards interoperability between DSL tools through the
use of open-source technologies.

Topics of Interest
------------------

* Fundamental values and principles for designing and using domain
specific modeling languages (DSMLs).

* Classification of the different kinds of DSML tool components, and
the artefacts created and exchanged between DSML tool components.

* Descriptions of existing or planned industrial projects that
illustrate the need for improved DSML tool interoperability.

* Evaluations of existing meta-meta model implementations, comparisons
of meta-meta model implementations, and proposals of new meta-meta
models that are conducive for improving DSML tool interoperability.

* Proposals for useful levels of DSML tool interoperability.

* Case studies of attempts (successful or not) to increase
interoperability between two or more DSML tools.

* Concrete tool interoperability requirements from organizations that
use DSMLs.

* Building an open community that owns interoperability standards for
DSML tools.

* Approaches that can be used for practical certification of tools
with respect to interoperability levels.

Important Dates
---------------

16 February 2009 Submission deadline for papers for publication
1 March 2009 Submission of Position Papers
13 March 2009 Notification of acceptance
20 March 2009 Camera ready copies
1 April 2009 Circulation of final position papers
14 April 2009 Workshop at ASWEC 2009

Submission Guidelines
---------------

The workshop accepts two types of submissions within the aims and
scope of KISS: reflective and proposals. A reflective submission
describes research or experience within the topics of interest
of the workshop. A proposal submission describes an approach or a
framework that the authors claim will contribute to the overall
objectives of KISS.

* For both types of papers, the length of the paper should be at
least 4 pages and should not exceed 13 pages using the correct
style (including references and appendices).

* The first page should begin with the title of the paper, author
names (contact author underlined), affiliations, and e-mail
addresses, followed by an abstract of no more than 150 words.

* In order to be considered for publication authors should use the
Springer format: follow the instructions at
http://www.springer.de/comp/lncs/authors.html ).

* Position papers may be submitted after the deadline and will be
circulated as input to the workshop. Papers submitted after the
deadline cannot be considered for publication in the workshop
proceedings.

Please mail your submission to Jorn Bettin (jbe at sofismo dot ch).

Publication
-----------

Accepted papers in the correct format will be published in the
workshop proceedings which will be distributed on registration.
The organizers are investigating the publication of the best papers
in a special issue of a suitable journal.

Workshop Organizers
-------------------

* Jorn Bettin, Sofismo, Switzerland.
* Keith Duddy, Smart Services CRC, Australia.

International Programme Committee (Provisional)
-----------------------------------------------

* Jorn Bettin, Sofismo, Switzerland.
* Tony Clark, Thames Valley University, UK.
* Craig Cleaveland, Whitebirch Software, United States.
* William Cook, University of Texas Austin, United States.
* Mark Dalgarno, Software Acumen, United Kingdom.
* Keith Duddy, Smart Services CRC, Australia.
* Jack Greenfield, Microsoft, United States.
* John Hosking, University of Auckland, New Zealand.
* Pavel Hruby, CSC , Denmark.
* Steven Kelly, MetaCase, Finland.
* Anneke Kleppe, Capgemini, The Netherlands
* Richard Paige, University of York, UK.
* Derek Roos, Mendex, The Netherlands.
* Bran Selic, Malina Software, Canada.
* Shane Sendall, Snowie Group, Switzerland.
* Peer Törngren, IBM, Sweden.
* Laurence Tratt, Bournemouth University, UK.
* Jim van Dam, HiPeS, The Netherlands.
* Markus Völter, independent consultant, Germany.
* Jos Warmer, Ordina, The Netherlands.
* James Willans, Independent Consultant, UK.

ENASE 2009 (6-10 May 2009, Milan, Italy)
4th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering
http://www.enase.org/

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper Submissions: November 28, 2008
Acceptance Notifications: January 26, 2009
Final Submissions and Registrations: February 9, 2009
The Conference Dates: May 6 - 10, 2009

MISSION AND MOTIVATION

The mission of the ENASE (Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering) conferences is to be a prime international forum to discuss and publish research findings and IT industry experiences with relation to evaluation of novel approaches to software engineering. By comparing novel approaches with established traditional practices and by evaluating them against software quality criteria, ENASE conferences advance knowledge and research in software engineering, identify most hopeful trends and propose new directions for consideration by researchers and practitioners involved in large-scale software development and integration. An innovative idea and important highlight of all ENASE conferences is the Advocatus Diaboli Forum (ADF). The main agenda for ADF-s is defined as to adversarially assess claims to novelty and utility for selected software engineering approaches. For ADF at ENASE 2009 the SE approach on trial is SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture).

PUBLICATION

All ENASE full, poster and demo papers will be published in time for the conference in the proceedings, produced by INSTICC under an ISBN reference, in paper and in CD-ROM form. After the conference, a book containing all ENASE full papers (modified and extended) will be edited and published as post-proceedings by Springer in the CCIS (Communications in Computer and Information Science) series.

Kind regards

Cesar Gonzalez-Perez
Member of the ENASE 2009 Steering Committee
http://www.verdewek.com/work

C A L L F O R P A P E R S
=============================

The 8th OOPSLA Workshop on Domain-Specific Modeling

October 19-20, 2008
Nashville, USA
http://www.dsmforum.org/events/DSM08

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Call for Papers:

Domain-Specific Modeling raises the level of abstraction beyond programming by specifying the solution directly using domain concepts. In many cases, final products can be generated automatically from these high-level specifications. This automation is possible because both the language and generators need fit the requirements of only one company and domain.

Industrial experiences of DSM consistently show it to be 5-10 times faster than current practices, including current UML-based implementations of MDA. More investigation is still needed in order to advance the acceptance and viability of Domain-Specific Modeling. This workshop welcomes three types
of submissions:

1) Full papers describing ideas on either a practical or theoretical level. Full papers should emphasize what is new and significant about the chosen approach and compare it to other research work in the field. The maximum length of a full paper is 4000 words.

2) Position papers describing work in progress or an author’s position regarding current DSM practice. The maximum length of a position paper is 2000 words.

3) DSM demonstrations describing a particular language, generator, or tool for a particular domain. The maximum length of a demo paper is 2000 words. During the workshop, the DSM solution presented in the paper can be demonstrated to the participants.

Some suggested topics for the workshop include, but are not limited to:
- Tools for supporting domain-specific modeling (DSM)
- Metamodeling frameworks and languages
- Comparison and analysis of model-driven development approaches
- Principles for identifying constructs for DSM languages
- Industry/academic experience reports describing success/failure in using Domain-Specific Modeling
- Novel approaches for code generation from domain-specific models
- Approaches to implement Domain-Specific Modeling languages
- Issues of support/maintenance of models and evolution of a DSM language in accordance with the representative domain
- Version control techniques for DSMs
- Specific domains where this technology can be most productive in the future (e.g., embedded systems, product family domains, or systems with multiple implementation platforms)
- Techniques for supporting (meta)model interchange between tools
- Relationships between ontologies and metamodels

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Important Dates:

Initial submission: August 4, 2008
Author Notification: September 4, 2008
(1 week prior to Early Registration deadline)
Final version: October 1, 2008
Workshop: October 19-20, 2008

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Submission Information:

Papers should be submitted by August 4, 2008. Contributions should be submitted electronically in PDF format at
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=oopsladsm08.

Submitted papers must conform to the ACM SIGPLAN conference style, using 9pt font (see guidelines at: http://www.sigplan.org/authorInformation.htm).

The accepted papers will be published in the printed proceedings and posted on the workshop web site.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Additional Information:

Additional information about the workshop (including contact information, past workshop papers, presentations, group work results) is available at the workshop web site: http://www.dsmforum.org/events/DSM08

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Program Committee:

Pierre America, Philips
Peter Bell, SystemsForge
Jorn Bettin, Sofismo
Philip T. Cox, Dalhousie University
Krzysztof Czarnecki, University of Waterloo
Brandon Eames, Utah State University
Ethan Jackson, Microsoft
Frederic Jouault, University of Nantes
Jürgen Jung, Deutche Post AG
Steven Kelly, MetaCase
Benoit Langlois, Thales
Gunther Lenz, Microsoft
Shih-Hsi Liu, California State University, Fresno
Kalle Lyytinen, Case Western Reserve University
Pentti Marttiin, Nokia Siemens Networks
Birger Moller-Pedersen, University of Oslo
Juha Pärssinen, VTT
Arturo Sanchez, University of North Florida
Markus Völter, independent consultant
Jing Zhang, Motorola Research

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Organizing Committee:

Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, MetaCase
Jeff Gray, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Matti Rossi, Helsinki School of Economics
Jonathan Sprinkle, University of Arizona

Dear software practitioner,
During software development, we often experience problems regarding the compilability, quality (e.g., maintainability), or conformance of our software. With a model-driven approach such as MDSD (Model-Driven Software Development), we might work on a higher abstraction level ( i.e., software models), but we (will) still experience similar problems during the development of our software models.

Therefore, in the context of the VIDE project, we are conducting a survey about how software modeling environments should annotate software models in order to provide additional information about these problems. Our goal is to get feedback from you on several annotation concepts and your opinion about other characteristics of defect annotations.

Hence, we would like to invite you and members of your organization to participate in the survey at http://www.online-poll.de/uc/vide-ma/. Answering the survey should take about 20-30 minutes. The survey will close on 1 October 2007.

We will draw five winners from all participants who finalized the survey; they will get an Amazon gift certificate (either amazon.com or from a local site) for $50.

Please pass information about this survey on to your colleagues and managers as well as other contacts who might be interested in this topic.

Many thanks in advance,
Joerg Rech and Axel Spriestersbach

---
Joerg Rech
Project Manager and Scientist
Speaker of the GI-Workgroup on Architecture and Design Patterns

Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE)
Tel.: +49 (0) 631/6800-2210 email: joerg.rech (at) iese.fraunhofer.de
XING: http://www.xing.com/profile/Joerg_Rech/
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/joergrech

Dear software practitioner,
During software development, we often experience problems regarding the compilability, quality (e.g., maintainability), or conformance of our software. With a model-driven approach such as MDSD (Model-Driven Software Development), we might work on a higher abstraction level (i.e., software models), but we (will) still experience similar problems during the development of our software models.

Therefore, in the context of the VIDE project, we are conducting a survey about how software modeling environments should annotate software models in order to provide additional information about these problems. Our goal is to get feedback from you on several annotation concepts and your opinion about other characteristics of defect annotations.

Hence, we would like to invite you and members of your organization to participate in the survey at http://www.online-poll.de/uc/vide-ma/. Answering the survey should take about 20-30 minutes. The survey will close on 1 October 2007.

We will draw five winners from all participants who finalized the survey; they will get an Amazon gift certificate (either amazon.com or from a local site) for $50.

Please pass information about this survey on to your colleagues and managers as well as other contacts who might be interested in this topic.

Many thanks in advance,
Joerg Rech and Axel Spriestersbach

---
Joerg Rech
Project Manager and Scientist
Speaker of the GI-Workgroup on Architecture and Design Patterns

Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE)
Tel.: +49 (0) 631/6800-2210 email: joerg.rech (at) iese.fraunhofer.de
XING: http://www.xing.com/profile/Joerg_Rech/
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/joergrech

Call for Papers

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3rd International Workshop on Graph and Model Transformation (GraMoT) Haifa, Israel June 12, 2007 http://www.mathematik.uni-marburg.de/~swt/gramot

A satellite event of the 3rd European Conference on Model-Driven Architecture 2007 http://www.haifa.il.ibm.com/conferences/ecmda2007/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Graphs are a general kind of models which have been used in various fields of computer science. On one hand, they are well-suited to formally describe complex structures. On the other hand, the underlying structure of models, especially visual models, can be described best by graphs, due to their multidimensional extension. Graphs can be manipulated by graph transformation in a rule-based manner. Considering current trends in software development such as model driven development and model-integrated computing, there is an emerging need to describe model manipulations, model evolution, model semantics, etc. in a precise way. Recent research has shown that graph transformation is a promising formalism to specify model transformations.

The goal of the workshop is to foster interaction between the graph transformation and the model transformation community to facilitate exchange of results and challenge problems. The graph transformation research community has built up a significant body of knowledge over the past 30 years and in addition to the theoretical base several practical implementations have been created. The research area of model transformations has recently been identified as a key subject in model-driven development. We believe there is a need for strong interaction and inter-operation between these communities: the intellectual interchange of ideas, problems, and solutions will lead to major advances in both fields.

Anticipated submissions are either research or position papers and not more than 12 pages long. Research papers present new results from actual research which might be preliminary or intermediate, while position papers report on lessons learned or open model transformation problems. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to:

- Graph transformation for the syntactical definition of model transformation languages
- Graph transformation as a tool to capture model transformation semantics
- Verification of model transformations based on graph transformation
- Novel concepts and results from graph transformations useful for model transformation
- Tool support for model transformation based on or inspired by graph transformation principles
- Comparison of graph transformation with other approaches to model transformation
- Novel application areas for graph transformation performing model transformation
- Problems in and limitations of model transformation where the use of graph transformation could help

Authors are invited to submit a title and abstract by March 19, 2007, and a full paper by March 26, 2007. Submissions are to be sent to the workshop organizers via email, in PDF or Postscript form. Simultaneous submission to other venues and submission of previously published material are not allowed. Electronic submission will be required, except by special arrangement with the program chairs. Authors will be notified of acceptance by April 23, 2007. Final, camera-ready versions of accepted papers must be submitted by May 15, 2007.

All submissions will undergo a review process by the program committee. The proceedings of this workshop will be published in the journal Electronic Communications of the EASST. A preliminary version of the proceedings will be available at the workshop. For preparing your manuscript, please use the ECEASST template for GraMoT'07 at http://www.easst.org/eceasst/template

Program Committee:
Krzysztof Czarnecki (Canada), Jeff Gray (United States), Martin Gogolla (Germany), Reiko Heckel (United Kingdom), Dirk Janssens (Belgium), Juan de Lara (Spain), Mark Minas (Germany), Mauro Pezze (Switzerland), Bernhard Rumpe (Germany), Andy Schuerr (Germany), Daniel Varro (Hungary), Albert Z|ndorf (Germany)

Workshop Organizers:
Gabor Karsai (United States)
Gabriele Taentzer (Germany)

Dear software practitioners, consultants, and researchers,
we are currently conducting an international survey about architecture and design patterns (on the code and model level). Our goal is to discover how familiar people are with these patterns (and anti-patterns) as well as to elicit the information need, the usage behavior, and the experience of software organizations regarding architecture patterns and design patterns.

Therefore, we would like to invite you and members of your organizations to participate in the survey at http://softwarepatterns.eu. Answering the survey should take about 20-30 minutes. The survey will close on 1 March 2007.

All data will be treated confidentially.

Please pass information about this survey on to your colleagues and managers as well as other contacts who might be interested in this topic and have experience with architecture and design patterns.

Many thanks in advance,
Joerg Rech

---
Joerg Rech
Speaker of the GI-Workgroup Architecture and Design Patterns (AKAEM)
Web: http://www.architekturmuster.de (in German)
XING: http://www.xing.com/profile/Joerg_Rech/