abstract from Prof. Dr. Kai Riemer:

Challenging the Philosophical Foundations of Modeling Organizational Reality: The Case of Process Modeling  

Representing organizational reality in conceptual models is an important part of Information Systems (IS) practice. In this critical polemic we challenge the philosophical foundation of conceptual modeling as presented in the literature. We take process modeling as our case. With our analysis we aim to expose and question taken-for-granted ontological and epistemological assumptions that underpin common accounts of conceptual modeling. We argue that, as a result of a grounding in dualist, cognitivist ontology, the literature regards the elicitation and representation of reality in the course of modeling as largely unproblematic. We draw on German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s philosophy to portray an alternative foundation that brings to the fore challenges in 1) eliciting knowledge on routine activities, 2) capturing knowledge from domain experts and 3) representing organizational reality in authentic ways. We hope to initiate a critical discussion on the implications of the current philosophical grounding of conceptual modeling.

Kai Riemer is Associate Professor and Chair of Business Information Systems at the University of Sydney Business School. Kai joined the University of Sydney in 2009 from Münster University in Germany, where he held a position as Assistant Professor. Kai’s expertise and research interests cover the areas of Social Networking, Technology Appropriation, Enterprise 2.0, Virtual Work, Digital Disruption and Philosophy of Technology. In one current research stream he focuses on the application and use of communication media and collaborative systems and their impact and effect on groups and people in virtual work contexts (such as virtual teams or distributed projects). In particular he is interested in Web 2.0 technologies in corporate contexts, such as Enterprise Microblogging platforms. A second stream of research focuses on the conceptualization of the IT artifact drawing on various works from the philosophy of technology and existential philosophy. Kai is a board member of the Journal of Information Technology, Electronic Markets, and the Business and Information Systems Engineering Journal.

abstract from Prof. Dr. Rafael Caballero Roldán:

Declarative Debugging

Debugging is a tedious, time consuming part of the software development life cycle.  However, most traditional debuggers are based on the same principles as 30 years ago: step-by-step execution of the code, breakpoints, variable inspectors, etc. Moreover, these techniques cannot be applied to some programming paradigms such as functional programs (Erlang, Haskell) or database query languages  (SQL), because in such cases the step-by-step execution makes little sense. In these cases eclarative debugging technique is a suitable alternative. The idea of declarative debugging is to abstract away the execution details to focus on the program logic. In particular, declarative debuggers represent a computation producing an erroneous result by means of a computation tree, where the root represents the main computation and the internal nodes represent the subcomputations needed to produce the result stored at their parent node. Once the tree has been built, the debugger asks questions to the user about the validity of the results stored in some internal nodes. The goal is to find a subcomputation that has produced an erroneous result but such that all its children contain valid results. Such node is called a buggy node, and its associated piece of code is a bug in the program.