Conceptual Modeling Perspectives – Book to honor Prof. Antoni Olivé

Conceptual modeling has always been one of the main issues in information systems engineering as it aims to describe the general knowledge of the system at an abstract level that facilitates user understanding and software development.

Few people (if anybody) has done more to evolve and consolidate the research field of conceptual modeling than Antoni Olivé. His book on Conceptual Modeling is THE reference book in the area and those of us who have had the chance to work with him will be forever grateful for all the knowledge he has shared with us.

That’s why we wanted to honor him with a book as a simple but honest recognition to his enormous contribution to the Conceptual Modeling discipline.

This book, Conceptual Modeling Perspectives, is the result of many colleagues eager to contribute their best efforts to think about the present and future of conceptual modeling. It was presented to him on the occasion of his keynote at ER 2017 in Valencia, a conference that he has contributed to and supported for over 20 years. Thank you very much to Antoni for so many years of cooperation and friendship!.

This collection of selected papers provides a comprehensive and extremely readable overview of what conceptual modeling is and perspectives on making it more and more relevant in our society. It covers topics like modeling the human genome, blockchain technology, model-driven software development, data integration, and wiki-like repositories and demonstrates the general applicability of conceptual modeling to various problems in diverse domains. Overall, this book is a source of inspiration for everybody in academia working on the vision of creating a strong, fruitful and creative community of conceptual modelers.

And remember, To model or not to model – that is the WRONG Question. As Antoni says, the model always exists, the only option designers have is about its form: it may be mental (exists only in the designers’ heads) or explicit. I hope this book and all his other work in the area of conceptual modeling will convince you about the importance and benefits of explicit models.