Year
2024
Authors
WATTIAU Isabelle, PRAT Nicolas, AKOKA Jacky, STOREY V.C
Abstract
Conceptual modeling, which emerged more than five decades ago, continues to experience significant developments. To understand how this field is evolving, we carried out bibliometric analyses of a corpus of 4652 research articles covering the period 1976-2022. Co-citation analysis identifies four schools of thought. The first begins with the introduction of the entity-relationship model (Chen 1976), which provides a simple set of concepts that can be used to abstract and model the real world. The second focuses on the quality of conceptual modeling. The third school brings together articles that refer to design science research and requirements engineering. Finally, the fourth and most recent school combines ontologies and conceptual modeling. A bibliographic coupling analysis over the period 2017-2022 produces ten classes characterizing the main themes of recent conceptual modeling research. Main path analysis of the citation network reveals three successive dynamics in the evolution of influential articles. The first dynamic, “refinement of the ER model”, extends from 1976 to 2000, with the article (Parsons and Wand, 2000) proposing a two-level model, classes and instances. The second dynamic describes contributions aimed at “improving conceptual modeling with ontologies”. The introduction of ontologies to make conceptual modeling easier and more robust is an important and perennial phenomenon, initiated gradually from the early 1990s onwards. A third dynamic, of “conceptual modeling for the digital world”, is emerging in 2017, focusing on the more recent concepts of crowdsourcing, open platforms or the combination of physical and digital realities.
AKOKA, J., WATTIAU, I., PRAT, N. et STOREY, V.C. (2024). 42ème Edition du Congrès INFORSID 2024. Nancy: INFormatique des ORganisations et Systèmes d’Information et de Décision. Dans: 42ème Edition du Congrès INFORSID 2024. Nancy: INFormatique des ORganisations et Systèmes d’Information et de Décision. Nancy.