Information Technology Reference
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perspective, because the results obtained in each of them are interwoven in order to
constitute an information system. In the following the principles of conceptual inter-
operability, interwoven aspects of these worlds, must be described in the perspective
of conceptual overlaps between them.
These interwoven aspects are explained by following the principles of conceptual
interoperability: they must be described in the conceptual overlaps, which have to
be formalized. Therefore, this section is organised as follows: the conceptual world,
which plays the central role here, is presented first following by the definition of the
overlap between this world and the informatics world and the overlap between this
world and the activities world. Then, a paragraph introduces the ontology world for
the IS cohesion and finally, some aspects of IS governance and general principles of
sustainable IS are provided.
The master concept of this section is model . An IS contains a huge number of
aspects, which must be described by means of models in a formalized way: a meta-
model . Since there are so many aspects to take into account for IS design, there
are consequently several meta-models, each of them covering a particular IS aspect.
This section is only at the level of meta-model and it replaces systematically the
term meta-model by model.
3.1 The IS Conceptual World
There are many relevant papers and topics [ 7, 12, 21, 23, 27] covering the IS con-
ceptual models. In [ 22] Antoni Olivé provides a relevant description of this crucial
domain. The master concept of this world is information . It comes in a variety
of concepts. Nevertheless, there are main atomic concepts such as class, method,
attribute, object, relation, integrity rule , 4 role, event, and also complex concepts
defined upon atomic ones like hyperclass, hyperobject, process, set of integrity rules,
hyper-role, complex event, IS component.
All these concepts are interrelated: a class is defined with attributes and meth-
ods; a method and an attribute is defined on a class; a relation is defined between
two classes; 5 an integrity rule is defined over one or several classes and expresses a
condition that objects must satisfy; a role determines a domain of activity in terms
of access rights to objects of classes and to methods of classes; an event is defined
by a condition expressed by means of the previous concepts. Hyperclass [ 34] is a
complex class defined on several classes: it is a generalization of the class concept
and so hyperobject is an object of a hyperclass. Process is defined over several meth-
ods and then of several classes, but also on several roles, on several events. A set
4 Often called integrity constraint.
5 For example existential dependency: a class A is existentially dependent on another class B if any
object of A is related with an object of B permanently; another kind of relation is specialization:
A is a specialization of B if A is existentially dependent on B and if an B object can be related to
only one A object.
 
 
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