This paper explores the impact creative engineering design methodologies will have on the development of conceptual system designs for technically complex systems. To meet the requirements of the many innovations of products and their technology, these technically complex systems must be innovative to make effective use of them. This report generates a value-chain that shows the link between cr...

Modelling, and in particular the construction of conceptual models, is an essential activity in the designing of information systems. Experience has shown the limits of conceptual models as a support in communicating and in the transmission of knowledge. The purpose of this article is to bring up some elements which can explain these difficulties. After a restatement about the object of concept...

The view that metaphor plays a fundamental structural role in organizing our conceptual systems, rather than serving a deviant rhetorical effect, is now generally accepted. Indeed, this idea drives many recent computational models (Weiner , 1984; Martin, 1990; Way, 1991;Veale & Keane, 1992a, 1992b). However, these analyses are based on the de-contextualised "contents" of the metaphor and ignore...

The transfer of organic material from one coastal environment to another can increase production in recipient habitats in a process known as spatial subsidy. Microorganisms drive the generation, transformation, and uptake of organic material in shallow coastal environments, but their significance in connecting coastal habitats through spatial subsidies has received limited attention. We address...

Model transformation is a key technology in modeldriven engineering. Unfortunately, transformations are typically written manually and thus they are likely to contain errors and to produce incorrect or undesired output. Safe transformation is the guarantee that for every possible source model, the transformed target model is valid with respect to user-definable wellformedness criteria. This pap...

For assessing conceptual data model quality it is useful to have quantitative and objective measurement instruments. The scarcity of such measurement instruments leaded us to define a set of measures for structural complexity, an internal quality attribute of conceptual data models, with the idea that it is related to the external quality of such models. In order to gather empirical evidence th...

We propose a set of operations for inquiring about the properties of individual objects and classes in an object-oriented database. The operations are closely related to the constructs introduced by our formalisa-tion of the object-oriented data model, through which we unify the representation of the intensional and the extensional portions of the object-oriented database. As a consequence, the...

In this paper, we present a conceptual data model for multimedia database applications based on ExIFO2 model. The ExIFO2 data model is chosen as the conceptual model since it handles both complex objects along with their uncertain and imprecise properties. We enhanced this conceptual model in order to meet the multimedia data requirements. In addition to uncertain and imprecise information, we ...

Zero carbon building (ZCB) has emerged as an innovative approach to improving building energy performance and reducing building carbon emissions. However, the uptake of the ZCB approach is slow, far from the mainstream practice of building. Previous studies have devoted to analyze the technical feasibility and design issues of ZCB. Some have examined the barriers to the adoption of ZCB practice...

Die etablierte Dokumentationspraxis von Sammlungsobjekten in Museen erfolgt vorrangig auf Grundlage einfacher Datenfelder (Karteikartenmodell). Der hier verfolgte methodische Ansatz bezieht die Darstellung von Prozessen bzw. deren Ereignissen mit ein. Das CIDOC „Conceptual Reference Model“ (ISO 21127) wurde als Referenzontologie, das sog. „Erlangen CRM / OWL“ umgesetzt. Auf Basis dieser in OWL ...