Towards Increased Comparability of Conceptual Models - Enforcing Naming Conventions through Domain Thesauri and Linguistic Grammars

Becker, Jörg; Delfmann, Patrick; Herwig, Sebastian; Lis, Łukasz; Stein, Armin

Abstract
Distributed construction of conceptual models may lead to a set of problems when these models are tobe compared or integrated. Different kinds of comparison conflicts are known (e.g. naming conflictsor structural conflicts), the resolution of which is subject of different approaches. However, the expostresolution of naming conflicts raises subsequent problems that origin from semantic diversities ofnamings - even if they are syntactically the same. Therefore, we propose an approach that allows foravoiding naming conflicts in conceptual models already during modelling. This way, the ex-postresolution of naming conflicts becomes obsolete. In order to realise this approach we combine domainthesauri as lexical conventions for the use of terms, and linguistic grammars as conventions for validphrase structures. The approach is generic in order to make it reusable for any conceptual modellinglanguage.

Keywords
Conceptual Modelling; Model Comparison; Domain Thesaurus; Computational Linguistics; Comparability