Towards a Multi-Objective Modularizations Approach for Entity-Relationship Models

Beschreibung

Legacy systems and their associated data models often evolve into large, monolithic artifacts. This threatens comprehensibility and maintainability by human beings. Breaking down a monolith into a modular structure is an established technique in software engineering. Several previous works aimed to adapt modularization also for conceptual data models. However, we currently see a research gap manifested in the absence of:(i)a flexible and extensible modularization concept for Entity Relationship (ER) models; (ii )of openly available tool support; and (iii) empirical evaluation. With this paper, we introduce a generic encoding of a modularization concept for ER models which enables the use of meta-heuristic search approaches. For the efficient application we introduce the ModulER tool. Eventually, we report on a twofold evaluation: First, we demonstrate feasibility and performance of the approach by two demonstration cases. Second, we report on an initial empirical experiment and a survey we conducted with modelers to compare automated modularizations with manually created ones and to better understand how humans approach ER modularization.

Zeitraum	04 Nov. 2020
Ereignistitel	Forum, Demo and Posters 2020 co-located with 39th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling ER 2020, Vienna, Austria, November 3-6, 2020
Veranstaltungstyp	Konferenz
Ort	ÖsterreichAuf Karte anzeigen