73F. Supporting Electronic Collaboration in Conceptual Modeling

We study collaborative modeling by analyzing conversations and loud thinking during modeling sessions and the resulting models themselves. We identify the basic activities of the modeling teams on the social, pragmatic, semantic and syntactic levels and derive a schema for the pragmatic level. Our main conclusion is that team-based modeling is largely a negotiation process. Drawing on these results we derive an architecture of a system that supports the distributed development of conceptual models.