To give my bias upfront: the book that contains my first book chapter is released today, in Innovations in Information Systems Modeling: Methods and Best Practices (part of the Advances in Database Research Book Series), which is edited by Terry Halpin, John Krogstie, and Erik Proper. To lazily copy the short description, the book has as scope (see title information sheet):
Modeling is used across a number of tasks in connection to information systems, but it is rare to see and easily compare all the uses of diagrammatical models as knowledge representation in one place, highlighting both commonalities and differences between different kinds of modeling.
Innovations in Information Systems Modeling: Methods and Best Practices provides up-to-date coverage of central topics in information systems modeling and architectures by leading researchers in the field. With chapters presented by top researchers from countries around the globe, this book provides a truly international perspective on the latest developments in information systems modeling, methods, and best practices.
The book has 15 chapters divided into four sections, being (I) language issues and improvements, (II) modelling approaches, (III) frameworks, architectures, and applications, and (IV) selected readings, containing altogether 15 chapters. The book chapters, whose abstracts are online here, range from refinements on subtyping, representing part-whole relations, and adapting ORM for representing application ontologies, to methodologies for enterprise and active knowledge modelling, to an ontological framework for method engineering and designing web information systems. The selected readings sections deal with, among others, a formal agent based approach for the modeling and verification of intelligent information systems and metamodelling in relation to software quality.
The chapter that I co-authored with Alessandro Artale is called “Essential, Mandatory, and Shared Parts in Conceptual Data Models” [1], which zooms in on formally representing the life cycle semantics of part-whole relations in conceptual data models such as those represented with ER, ORM and UML. We do this by using the temporal modality and some new fancy extensions to ERvt—a temporal EER based on the description logic language DLRus—to cover things such as essential parts, temporally suspended relations, and shareability options such as sequentially versus concurrently being part of some whole. To aid the modeler in applying it during the conceptual analysis stage, we also provide a set of closed questions and decision diagrams to find the appropriate life cycle.
A disadvantage of publishing with IGI is that they don’t accept latex files, but the poor lad from the typesetting office was patient and did his best to make something presentable out of it in MS Word (ok, I wasted quite some time on it, too). I don’t have a soft copy of the final layout version, but if you would like to have a latex-ed preprint, feel free to drop me an email. Alternatively, to gain access to all the chapters: the early-bird price (until Feb. 1, 2009) knocks off $15 of the full price of the hardcover.
[1] Alessandro Artale, and C. Maria Keet. Essential, Mandatory, and Shared Parts in Conceptual Data Models (chapter 2). In: Innovations in Information Systems Modeling: Methods and Best Practices, Terry Halpin, John Krogstie, and Erik Proper (Eds.). IGI Global, 2008, pp 17-52. ISBN: 978-1-60566-278-7
Keet blog 