Slides of the DAMA SA talk about modelling languages
Last year I was invited to give a webinar for the Southern Africa chapter of the Data Management Association (DAMA), with the brief that they wanted me to cover “everything” from my The What and How of Modelling Information and Knowledge. In less than one hour. It does not fit in an hour, though looking at the slides of “Strengths and limitations of different types of modelling languages” when I uploaded them recently, I did manage to cram a good amount of material into it. They may not make a lot of sense without the explanations I added during the presentation, but I’ve shared them just in case they might.
The talk commenced touching upon mind maps and models in other disciplines (using hydrology as a new running example) mainly to illustrate their ‘nice, but…’ weaknesses. Those limitations were then solved with conceptual data models and ontologies. The talk’s, and slides’, final section introduced comparisons of types of models and the, by these days nigh on obligatory, notes on whether one could end up with biassed models (spoiler: you can).
The comparison (also blogged about on the Modeling languages blog of Jordi Cabot) is, perhaps, most interesting from the perspective of professionalism in modelling in industry: which type of model to use when, and why – among the declarative models covered, that is. Choosing the wrong type of declarative model can have dire consequence. Too simple a representation can result in missed inferences that are crucial for adequate software quality; too complex a representation can take too much time to develop for a pressing problem that can get a life-saving proverbial 80% bang for the modelling buck.
More details about these topics can be found in the modelling book (written for a broader audience), which is available from Springer and many online book sellers, and even more details on various subtopics can be found in my ontology engineering open textbook and freely accessible scientific papers. I also may be able to make time for a talk.