Ravi Ramdoyal, Anthony Cleve, From Pattern-based User Interfaces to Conceptual Schemas and Back, in Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER’2011), Brussels, Belgium, Octobre 2011, LNCS. accepted for publication (joined presentation FUNDP+CETIC).
Since the necessity to associate end-users of the future system with its specification and development steps has proven indisputable, it is crucial to define accessible means to express and communicate conceptual requirements between end-users and analysts in the context of Information Systems engineering. For this purpose, we present a simple form-based interface model offering an understandable and expressive graphical counterpart to a rich subset of the Generic Entity-Relationship model (GER). We describe how the elements of the proposed interface model can be translated into GER schema constructs, bearing the semantic characterisation of inter-concept relationships. The exposed principles support the automated translation of user-drawn form-based interfaces into a conceptual schema. The same principles can also serve as a basis to support the inverse translation process that aims at deriving a set of form-based interfaces from a conceptual schema.