The Behavior Integrated Entity Relationship Method 'BIER' applied to the Development of a Governmental Office Information Systems

In this paper we describe how we use the BIER data model to design the governmental office information system KIS (Kanzlei-Informations-System). KIS has been designed and implemented on our institute in cooperation with Nixdorf Austria. During our work we soon find out that the behavior (state transition) respectively the historical states of the document can hardly be modelled with a relational data model. Therefore we have used our BIER-Model, a framework of modelling static components and dynamic processes in an information system. To model the static component we use an extendet Entity-Relationship diagram and for the dynamic model we use a Petri net based graph representation. The experiences with the BIER-Model show that the design of a governmental office information system can be supported in a very efficient manner and, because of the integrity management facilities, the schema created are always tested about the correctness. Furthermore the graphic method allows a step-wise extension of defined schemas.