ONTOLOGICAL EVALUATION OF REFERENCE MODELS USING THE BUNGE-WAND-WEBER MODEL
Peter Fettke, Peter Loos · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2003
Within the information systems field, reference models have been known for many years.A reference model is a conceptual framework and may be used as a blueprint for information systems development.Despite the relevance of reference model quality, little research has been undertaken on their systematical evaluation.In this paper, we propose an approach to evaluate reference models based on the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology.We demonstrate that this application is possible and useful for model evaluation and several other areas.The main idea of our approach is the ontological normalization of a reference model.An ontological normalization is comparable with the normalization of a database schema but considers the structure of reality and not technical aspects.The ontological normalization of a reference model consists of four steps: (1) Developing a transformation mapping, (2) Identifying ontological modeling deficiencies, (3) Transforming the reference model, and (4) Assessing the results.Although our approach is based on sound theory, we argue that this approach is not inherently superior to other approaches of reference model evaluation.