This Festschrift volume, published in honor of John Mylopoulos on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Toronto, contains 25 high-quality papers, written by leading scientists in the field of conceptual modeling. The volume has been divided into six sections. The first section focuses on the foundations of conceptual modeling and contains material on ontologies and knowledge representation. The four sections on software and requirements engineering, information systems, information integration, and web and services, represent the chief current application domains of conceptual modeling. Finally, the section on implementations concentrates on projects that build tools to support conceptual modeling. With its in-depth coverage of diverse topics, this book could be a useful companion to a course on conceptual modeling.

This book constitutes the refereed joint proceedings of six workshops held in conjunction with the 26th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling. Topics include conceptual modeling for life sciences applications, foundations and practices of UML, ontologies and information systems for the semantic Web , quality of information systems, requirements, intentions and goals in conceptual modeling, and semantic and conceptual issues in geographic information systems.

Conceptual modeling represents a recent approach to creating knowledge. It has emerged in response to the computer revolution, which started in the middle of the 20th century. Computers, in the meantime, have become a major knowledge media. Conceptual modeling provides an answer to the difficulties experienced throughout the development of computer applications and aims at creating effective, reasonably priced, and sharable knowledge about using computers in business. Moreover, it has become evident that conceptual modeling has the potential to exceed the boundaries of business and computer usage. This state-of-the-art survey originates from the International Seminar on the Evolution of Conceptual Modeling, held in Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in April 2008. The major objective of this seminar was to look into conceptual modeling from a historical perspective with a view towards the future of conceptual modeling and to achieve a better understanding of conceptual modeling issues in several different domains of discourse, going beyond individual (modeling) projects. The book contains 14 chapters. These were carefully selected during two rounds of reviewing and improvement from 26 presentations at the seminar and are preceded by a detailed preface providing general insights into the field of conceptual modeling that are not necessarily discussed in any of the chapters but nevertheless aid in conceptualizing the inner structure and coherence of the field. The chapters are grouped into the following three thematic sections: the evolution of conceptual modeling techniques; the extension of conceptual modeling to a service-oriented, peer-to-peer, or Web context; and new directions for conceptual modeling.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2023, held in Lisbon, Portugal, during November 6-9, 2023. The 21 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 121 submissions. Additionally, the book contains 4 keynote speeches and 3 tutorials, and one invited paper corresponding to one of the keynote speeches. The papers cover a broad spectrum of classical and modern topics on conceptual modeling, including research and practice in the theories of concepts and ontologies, techniques for transforming conceptual models into effective implementations, and methods and tools for developing and communicating conceptual models.

Conceptual modeling is about describing the semantics of software applications at a high level of abstraction in terms of structure, behavior, and user interaction. Embley and Thalheim start with a manifesto stating that the dream of developing information systems strictly by conceptual modeling – as expressed in the phrase “the model is the code” – is becoming reality. The subsequent contributions written by leading researchers in the field support the manifesto's assertions, showing not only how to abstractly model complex information systems but also how to formalize abstract specifications in ways that let developers complete programming tasks within the conceptual model itself. They are grouped into sections on programming with conceptual models, structure modeling, process modeling, user interface modeling, and special challenge areas such as conceptual geometric modeling, information integration, and biological conceptual modeling. The Handbook of Conceptual Modeling collects in a single volume many of the best conceptual-modeling ideas, techniques, and practices as well as the challenges that drive research in the field. Thus it is much more than a traditional handbook for advanced professionals, as it also provides both a firm foundation for the field of conceptual modeling, and points researchers and graduate students towards interesting challenges and paths for how to contribute to this fundamental field of computer science.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 41st International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2022, held in Hyderabad, India, in October 2022. The 19 full and 11 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 82 submissions. The papers are organzed in the following topical sections: ​foundations of conceptual modeling; ontologies and their applications; applications of conceptual modeling; data modeling and analysis; business process; quality and performance; security, privacy and risk management; goals and requirements.

Conceptual modeling has always been one of the main issues in information systems engineering as it aims to describe the general knowledge of the system at an abstract level that facilitates user understanding and software development. This collection of selected papers provides a comprehensive and extremely readable overview of what conceptual modeling is and perspectives on making it more and more relevant in our society. It covers topics like modeling the human genome, blockchain technology, model-driven software development, data integration, and wiki-like repositories and demonstrates the general applicability of conceptual modeling to various problems in diverse domains. Overall, this book is a source of inspiration for everybody in academia working on the vision of creating a strong, fruitful and creative community of conceptual modelers. With this book the editors and authors want to honor Prof. Antoni Olivé for his enormous and ongoing contributions to the conceptual modeling discipline. It was presented to him on the occasion of his keynote at ER 2017 in Valencia, a conference that he has contributed to and supported for over 20 years. Thank you very much to Antoni for so many years of cooperation and friendship.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2010, held in Vancouver, BC, Canada, in November 2010. The 32 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 147 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on business process modeling; requirements engineering and modeling 1; requirements engineering and modeling 2; data evolution and adaptation; operations on spatio-temporal data; demos and posters; model abstraction, feature modeling, and filtering; integration and composition; consistency, satisfiability and compliance checking; using ontologies for query answering; and document and query processing.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Modelling Foundations and Applications, ECMFA 2016, held as part of STAF 2016, in Vienna, Austria, in July 2016. The 16 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 47 submissions. The committee decided to accept 16 papers, 12 papers for the Foundations Track and 4 papers for the Applications Track. Papers on a wide range of MBE aspects were accepted, including topics such as multi- and many models, language engineering, UML and meta-modeling, experience reports and case studies, and variability and uncertainty.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2018, held in XI'an, China, in October 2018. The 30 full and 13 short papers presented together with 3 keynotes were carefully reviewed and selected from 151 submissions. This events covers a wide range of following topics: Conceptual modeling studies, ontological modeling, semi-structured data modeling, process modeling and management, spatio-temporal modeling, cloud-based modeling, schema and view modeling,languages and models, NoSQL modeling, conceptual modeling for machine learning and reasoning, applications of conceptual modeling.