The Impact of Linguistics on Conceptual Models: Consistency and Understandability

This paper describes a vision in which linguistic knowledge and theories are introduced into conceptual modeling, and it sums up the advantages achieved by this approach. We will show how the extension of conceptual modeling techniques with linguistic theories increases their expressive power, the capability to formalize well-known conceptual aspects, like object roles and constraints, and their internal consistency. Furthermore, we will explain the advantages gained from using such an extended conceptual modeling technique by describing the adjustments and improvements of the modeling process itself and the extensions to the validation and veri-cation process of the sophisticated models. We will demonstrate this approach by introducing a linguistically based modeling environment, C o l o ^ R-X .