Universitatea Babeș-Bolyai
The OMiLAB domain of interest: Conceptual Modeling
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The OMiLAB domain of interest: Conceptual Modeling

INOVATIVA

Prof. univ. dr. Robert Andrei Buchmann – Business Information Systems @ FSEGA

 

 

The scientific domain of interest for the OMiLAB@UBB-FSEGA laboratory is Conceptual Modeling, a discipline whose name is often diluted by its diverse application domains. For novices, it is best understood by referring to established standards that academics and practitioners commonly use but take for granted, without questioning their underlying nature and provenance.

Such standards are commonly used in Computer Science, Business Analysis or the boundary between the two – where business-IT alignment and dependency analysis inevitably requires some form of conceptual structuring and clarification. Our students most probably use conceptual modeling to design databases (e.g. ER models) or software systems (e.g. UML models), to analyze business processes (e.g. BPMN models) or business-IT alignment (e.g. Archimate models) – but in our experience, students most often associate these with the tool vendors (e.g. Microsoft Visio) and not with the actual organizations developing and maintaining those modeling languages and associated standards.

Users of such diagrammatic languages rarely need to question their nature or the cognitive functions that the respective modeling methods fulfil, but modeling methods are actually investigated, engineered and scientifically scrutinized by longstanding dedicated communities:

  • a community interested in ER modeling was consolidated since the 70s around the ER conference (the 2024 edition to take place in Pittsburgh: https://resources.sei.cmu.edu/news-events/events/er2024/,) gradually incorporating sub-communities interested in ontology engineering, knowledge graphs and enterprise modeling;
  • the UML standard has been associated since the 90s with the MODELS conference (the 2024 edition to take place in Linz: https://conf.researchr.org/home/models-2024), expanding towards concerns about low-code development, model-driven engineering and domain-specific languages;
  • the business process management community, typically relying on the BPMN standard, initiated in early 2000s the BPM conference (the 2024 edition to take place in Krakow: https://bpm2024.agh.edu.pl/), guiding research on the discovery, simulation and automation of business processes.

Such movements are complemented by communities that are more specialized thematically and technically, or that address cross-cutting concerns that are not necessarily specific to an application domain. Such communities and consortia have been fostered by past events and workshops, or around tools, ecosystems, methodology and best practices. In this category we include the OMiLAB Network, where the laboratory OMiLAB@UBB-FSEGA (https://econ.ubbcluj.ro/omilab/index.php) belongs, together with other 20 nodes from 10 countries and continually expanding – see https://www.omilab.org/nodes/.

 

OMiLAB as think tank on the role of Conceptual Modeling in Digital Innovation

Most conceptual modeling standards are maintained by consortia that also act as “think tanks”, governing their specifications and methodology, guiding evolution, stimulating adoption and standardization. Object Management Group (https://www.omg.org/ ), Workflow Management Coalition (https://wfmc.org/ ), The Open Group (https://www.opengroup.org/ ) are some notable examples.

In our experience, the OMiLAB Network distinguishes itself from such consortia by several characteristics:

  1. it is not buit around a standard, but around a methodology that allows any standard to be enriched and adapted for a targeted application domain or technological environment; the typical result is a so-called DSL (domain-specific language) capable of capturing richer descriptions of a the system or situation being modelled;
  2. it ensures software support for that methodology, so that anyone can create their own modeling tool guided by specific requirements or experimental needs, for any domain of activity and any level of required granularity – from superficial sketching of an idea (e.g. mind mapping) to the so-called Digital Twins or Knowledge Graphs;
  3. these ingredients are subordinated to a general preoccupation for investigating conceptual modeling as enabler for digital innovation and transformation.

Digital Innovation and Transformation are not ad-hoc phenomena triggered by some brilliant idea that comes out of nowhere, readily implementable by an enthusiastic team. It involves a process of cognitive refinement – from unstructured ideas towards an implementation that be governed, even out-sourced. This cognitive refinement goes through phases that are served in one way or another by Conceptual Modeling: on strategic or technical level, looking at digital services and the infrastructure on which to build them, at business processes and their digitalized versions, at taxonomies of resources and factors that are specific to an application domain.

Conceptual models represent the „know-how” of innovation and the inventory of assets subjected to digital transformation, and of the dependency relationships that propagate changes during digital transformation. Equally important to the contents of models is the act of modeling, which gives occasion to collateral efforts of discovery, clarification and decomposition of a problem/solution, down to the level of detail allowed by the adopted modeling method – this being exactly the object of investigation for the OMiLAB community

In this context, the “think tank” activities of the OMiLAB Network can be summarized as mission statements:

  • to propose and evaluate new modeling methods, through scientific articles and academic dissertations;
  • to disseminate such methods in community events – summer schools, tutorials, workshops;
  • to provide educational support (software as well as didactic content) for established modeling methods, and also for experimental ones – e.g. for student projects that are not limited to simple use, adopting also a researcher perspective;
  • to develop expertise that can be offered to local businesses and start-ups, particularly for activities such as: business analysis, design thinking, enterprise and process modeling, knowledge graph development, digital twin engineering.

The nodes of the OMiLAB Network tend to specialize in one or another of these directions, depending on the availability of human resources – however, at OMiLAB@UBB- FSEGA we hope to build a portfolio that can cover all the mission statements above.

 

OMiLAB as digital ecosystem

The quality of OMiLAB as a digital ecosystem is founded on the toolkits, methods, active contributors and dissemination channels supporting scientific and educational activities.

The scientific research in the area of Conceptual Modeling develops in four directions supported by the OMiLAB ecosystem:

  1. Empirical research, purely observational: e.g. observing the cognitive effort of modeling and model comprehension by human subjects, measuring the adequacy of models for certain application goals and contexts;
  2. Constructivist research, prescriptive on methodological level: improving or extending modeling methods and languages, proposing new methods and domain-specific languages;
  3. Constructivist research on instrumental level: building software tools and model-driven components, typically as demonstrators for a scientific contribution from the previous points;
  4. Applicative research: adopting modeling methods to support the analysis of a case study.

Researchers can work in one or several of these directions, depending on the scientific domain where they aim to contribute. For instance, approach (3) fits doctoral research in computer science, approach (1) is more adequate for business and cognitive sciences, approach (4) is more business or industrial-oriented, and a multidisciplinary team can potentially orchestrate all of them in a long-term project. Research in this field is iterative and cummulative – e.g. results from approach (1) will motivate a research initiative through approach (2).

This diversity of research approaches ca be observed in events and dissemination channels of the OMiLAB community:

OMiLAB as educational ecosystem

The toolkits available in OMiLAB demonstrate the versatility of Conceptual Modeling in how it produces knowledge structures that can be interpreted both by human cognition (e.g. during business analysis) and by machines (e.g. in automation projects).

In FSEGA the OMiLAB toolkits are predominantly used in the English-language master program Business Modeling and Distributed Computing (https://econ.ubbcluj.ro/programe/bmdc/index.php), where some courses leverage OMiLAB resources – from chapters on business process modeling to tasks on model-driven automation with the help of Internet of Things or Knowledge Graphs.

The main tools available at OMiLAB are:

  • BEE-UP (https://bee-up.omilab.org/activities/bee-up/): modeling tool for established methods (BPMN, UML, ER, EPC, Petri Nets and others), also open to experimental extensions;
  • ADOxx (https://www.omilab.org/adoxx/): metamodeling platform for deploying new visual DSLs or for extending BEE-UP for specific purposes and narrow domains;
  • Robotic devices (Dobot, Mbot) coordinated by Raspberry Pi servers, with software components to ensure interoperability between modeling tools, robotic devices and other instruments that can process the contents of models (GraphDB);
  • Scene2Model (https://www.omilab.org/nodes/design-thinking/): storyboarding tool for design thinking workshops based on SAP Scenes figurines;
  • A cumulative collection of modeling tools built by members of OMiLAB (https://austria.omilab.org/psm/exploreprojects), in various stages of maturity and usability, open to reuse, extension and general experimentation.

To this, we add resources obtained in past FSEGA projects – a GraphDB enterprise-grade license for storing knowledge graphs (https://www.ontotext.com/knowledgehub/fundamentals/what-is-a-knowledge-graph/), a number of Raspberry Pi devices for student projects, academic licenses for process mining and enterprise architecting tools.

 

OMiLAB@UBB-FSEGA as source of expertise for service offerings

In terms of potential societal service offerings, OMiLAB@UBB-FSEGA builds expertise that can be subject of knowledge transfers in several scopes:

  • business process modeling and analysis;
  • process mining;
  • design thinking;
  • enterprise architecture modeling;
  • design and implementation of knowledge graphs or digital twins based on knowledge graphs.

To this, we add the expertise on DSL engineering and adaptation of modeling standards – however, this type of expertise contributes mainly on a methodological level and not directly to services that can be operationalized for the regional business environment; instead, it is scientific expertise that can contribute to research projects. In the same category, that can be valuable to R&D collaborations, we include the robotic devices that can be used for experimental feasibility demonstrators of various model-driven mechanisms.