ORM 2006 PC Co-chairs’ Message

Following a successful workshop held in Cyprus in 2005, this is the second in a series of fact-oriented modeling workshops run in conjunction with the OTM conferences. Fact-oriented modeling is a conceptual approach to modeling and querying the information semantics of business domains in terms of the underlying facts of interest, where all facts and rules may be verbalized in language that is readily understandable by non-technical users of those business domains. Unlike Entity-Relationship (ER) modeling and UML class diagrams, fact-oriented modeling treats all facts as relationships (unary, binary, ternary etc.). How facts are grouped into structures (e.g. attribute-based entity types, classes, relation schemes, XML schemas) is considered a lower level, implementation issue that is irrelevant to the capturing essential business semantics. Avoiding attributes in the base model enhances semantic stability and populatability, as well as facilitating natural verbalization. For information modeling, fact-oriented graphical notations are typically far more expressive than those provided by other notations. Fact-oriented textual languages are based on formal subsets of native languages, so are easier to understand by business people than technical languages like OCL. Fact-oriented modeling includes procedures for mapping to attribute-based structures, so may also be used to front-end other approaches.