ORM’10 - PC Co-chairs Message

Following successful workshops held in Cyprus (2005), France (2006), Portugal (2007), Mexico (2008) and Portugal (2009), this is the sixth fact-oriented modeling workshop run in conjunction with the OTM conferences. Fact-oriented modeling is a conceptual approach to model and query the semantics of business domains in terms of the underlying facts of interest, where all facts and rules may be verbalized in language readily understandable by users working in those 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 design level, implementation issue irrelevant to capturing the essential business semantics. Avoiding attributes in the base model en-hances semantic stability and populatability, and facilitates natural verbalization and thus more productive communication with all stakeholders. For information modeling, fact-oriented graphical notations are typically far more expressive than those provided by other notations. Fact-oriented modeling includes procedures for mapping to attribute-based structures, so may also be used to front-end those approaches.

Editors and Affiliations

1. STAR Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Bldg G/10, Pleinlaan 2, 1050, Brussels, Belgium

   Robert Meersman

2. Curtin University of Technology, DEBII - CBS, De Laeter Way, 6102, Bentley, WA, Australia

   Tharam Dillon

3. Facultad de Informática, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Campus de Montegancedo S/N, 28660, Boadilla del Monte, Madrid, Spain

   Pilar Herrero

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