The Effects of Construct Redundancy on Readers' Understanding of Conceptual Models

2. Theoretical Background And Prediction

Ontological theory explains the structure and behavior of the world. If one agrees to the worldview expressed by the ontological theory, then a mental model of some real-world situation can be created in terms of the ontological constructs and this model can be externalized by articulating it with grammatical constructs (Guizzardi, 2005). The theory of ontological expressiveness (Wand & Weber, 1993) identifies four types of ontological deficiency of a conceptual modeling grammar that might affect the ability to represent some real-world phenomena completely and clearly. These deficiencies are: (a) construct deficit – when the grammar contains no construct that maps to a particular ontological construct, (b) construct excess- when the grammar contains a construct that does not map to any ontological construct, (c) construct overload- when the grammar contains a construct that maps to two or more ontological constructs, and (d) construct redundancy- when the grammar contains two or more constructs that map to a single ontological construct. Wand and Weber (2017) mention that construct deficit undermines the ontological completeness of a grammar and ontological excess, overload, and redundancy undermine its ontological clarity.