Which concepts do inexperienced modelers use to model work? – An exploratory study

Modeling languages are generally designed to meet the requirements imposed on them by the domain to be represented and the intended application area of the resulting models. Their comprehensibility and appropriateness for domain experts, who are not necessarily experienced modelers, usually is not considered during language design. While some aspects such as notational properties of languages and their understandability have been subject to extensive research in this area, the semantic appropriateness of language constructs has hardly been a subject of research so far. This paper presents a set of exploratory studies that examine the use of different conceptual modeling languages by inexperienced modelers. The results indicate that the set of available modeling language concepts seems to influence the focus of articulation for inexperienced modelers. Mismatches between modeling language concepts and modelers’ conceptualizations of the modeling domain appear to be compensated by ad-hoc re-definitions of language element semantics. Based on these findings we identify implications that need to be considered when designing modeling languages suitable for articulation by inexperienced modelers.