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Near real-time collaborative modeling for view-based Web information systems engineering
•The approach and framework which we hereby propose realize domain independent conceptual modeling in the Web browser through a visual modeling paradigm.•Supported by a distributed architecture, the framework provides the flexibility during modeling to accommodate live edits created synchronously by...
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| Published in: | Information systems (Oxford) 2018-05, Vol.74, p.23-39 |
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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Subjects: | |
| Citations: | Items that this one cites Items that cite this one |
| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | •The approach and framework which we hereby propose realize domain independent conceptual modeling in the Web browser through a visual modeling paradigm.•Supported by a distributed architecture, the framework provides the flexibility during modeling to accommodate live edits created synchronously by multiple modelers, is easy to extend and features a powerful yet simple metamodel-based solution.•The pillars of our concept are the generation of visual model editors based on defined metamodels, the viewpoint-view abstraction and the optimistic, conflict-free near real-time collaboration during the (view) model authoring.•In order to support multiple stakeholders during information systems design, we use state-of-the-art algorithms for managing shared editing conflicts from the CSCW literature that align conceptual modeling practices with agile and collaborative Web-based development.
Conceptual modeling is a creative, social process driven by the views of stakeholders. In modern, agile development – especially for continuously evolving Web applications – contributions from a wide variety of geographically distributed stakeholders, their involvement in negotiation and impact analysis from different perspectives and the rapid prototype generation from specifications gain much importance. Moreover, people have come to expect easy near real-time system support with few restrictions. While conceptual modeling or CSCW environments exist for each of these individual aspects, their interplay has barely been studied. This paper presents a collaborative conceptual modeling approach called SyncMeta that aims to close this gap by supporting view-based modeling in the Web browser in a near real-time shared editing environment11This paper is an extension of Nicolaescu et al. [1], “View-based Near Real-Time Collaborative Modeling for Information Systems Engineering”, in CAiSE 2016 (best paper award).. In addition to domain-specific graphical modeling languages, viewpoints can be collaboratively defined on the meta-modeling layer and instantiated as views within a model editor instance. Besides this formal structure, we also discuss the choice of algorithms for locking-free shared model editing and of highly scalable team size. In addition to this kind of technical evaluation, the paper also presents several medium-scale user studies that have accompanied the iterative SyncMeta development. These studies investigated both the requirements (quality advantages and user accept |
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| ISSN: | 0306-4379 1873-6076 |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.is.2017.07.008 |