An Attempt to Establish a Correspondence between Development Methods and Problem Domains - Advanced Topics in Database Research - page 174

Table 1: Identifi cative dictionary

Element Description

Hospital 123 Admits patients

Patients From waiting list

From emergency department

Waiting list patient Is assigned a room

Suffers complaint
Is admitted from waiting list

Emergency department patient Is assigned a room

Suffers complaint
Is admitted from emergency department

Doctor Is reference physician of waiting list patient

Is specialized in complaint

Emergency doctor Is reference physician of emergency depart-

ment patient
Is specialized in complaint
Treats patient in emergency department

Room Belongs to ward

Ward Is assigned to a complaint

Complaint

information loss, primarily in the early stages of analysis, as information that appears to be
similar may turn out to be very different later.

• Descriptive dictionary: This is a likewise tabular representation formalism, which
is used, unlike the identifi cative dictionary, during the later phases of analysis. Its
function is to record refi ned information about the problem domain, which will later
enable the identifi cation of which CM and, therefore, which method and technique
are best suited for solving the problem under analysis. Table 2 shows an example.
• Narrative text: This is a textual representation formalism that can be used to transcribe
the information recorded in the concept map and the dictionaries. The narrative de-
scription can be automatically derived from the concept map and dictionaries, which
has some clear benefi ts for model validation. The text is very understandable for end
users, and, as there is a direct relationship between the narrative description and the
other representation formalisms, the comments and corrections made by the users can
be fed back into the concept map and the dictionaries. Table 3 shows an example.

Of these formalisms, the principal one is the concept map, as it supports problem ex-
amination and understanding. Additionally, transformation rules have been defi ned between
the different GCM representation formalisms (Dieste, 2003), which means that the concept
map, dictionaries and narrative text can represent the same information in different ways
(graphs, tables and text). Tables 1, 2 and 3 actually do represent the same information as
the concept map in Figure 4.