Towards the Specification of Digital Content – The Enterprise Content Modeling Language (ECML)

vom Brocke Jan, Becker Jörg, Simons Alexander, Fleischer Stefan

Abstract
In today's work life, particularly large-scale organizations are becoming more and more aware of the fact that Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the requisite technology for addressing their compliance, governance, and business process efficiency needs. However, there are lots of obstacles that may face organizations when implementing ECM systems (ECMS). Especially the multiplicity and diversity of digital content captured within an organization makes a tailored ECMS adoption difficult. As conceptual modeling is a widely established means for the structured analysis and design of Information Systems (IS), with this paper, we propose a conceptual modeling language for ECM, called the Enterprise Content Modeling Language (ECML). Though there are several conceptual modeling languages/techniques that have been developed in related disciplines, e. g. information management or information requirements engineering, none of them was found to be appropriate to fulfill all the requirements that a modeling language for ECM has to meet.

Keywords
Conceptual Modeling; Content; Content Model; Content Specification; Enterprise Content Management (ECM); Enterprise Content Modeling Language (ECML); Modeling Language