A web-based filtering engine for understanding event specifications in large conceptual schemas

Abstract

A complete conceptual schema must include all relevant general static and dynamic aspects of an information system. Event types describe a nonempty set of allowed changes in the population of entity or relationship types in the domain of the conceptual schema. The conceptual schemas of many real-world information systems that include the speci cation of event types are too large to be easily managed or understood. There are many information system development activities in which people need to understand the eff ect of a set of events. We present an information filtering tool in which a user focuses on one or more event types of interest for her task at hand, and the tool automatically filters the schema in order to obtain a reduced conceptual schema that illustrates all the elements affected by the given events.