Lightweight Semantic Prototyper for Conceptual Modeling

While much research work was devoted to conceptual model quality validation techniques, most of the existing tools in this domain focus on syntactic quality. Tool support for checking semantic quality (correspondence between the conceptual model and requirements of a domain to be engineered) is largely lacking. This work introduces a lightweight model-driven semantic prototyper to test/validate conceptual models. The goal of the tool is twofold: (1) to assist business analysts in validating semantic quality of conceptual business specifications using a fast prototyper to communicate with domain experts; (2) to support the learning perspective of conceptual modeling for less experienced modelers (such as students or novice analysts in their early career) to facilitate their progression to advanced level of expertise. The learning perspective is supported by providing automated feedback that visually links the test results to their causes in the model’s design. The effectiveness of the tool has been confirmed by means of empirical experimental studies.