Using DEMO and ORM in Concert: A Case Study

Abstract

The Demo Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) enables business processes of organizations to be modeled at a conceptual level, independent of how the processes are implemented. DEMO focuses on the communication acts that take place between human actors in the organization. The Object-Role Modeling (ORM) approach enables business information to be modeled conceptually, in terms of fact types as well as the business rules that constrain how the fact types may be populated for any given state of the information system and how derived facts may be inferred from other facts. ORM also includes procedures to map conceptual data models to physical database schemas. Both DEMO and ORM treat fact types as fundamental, and require that their models be expressible in natural language sentences. This suggests that the approaches may be synthesized in a natural way, resulting in a more powerful method for business modeling. This chapter discusses an exploratory case study in which both methods were used in concert, and identifies some lessons learned.