ONTOLOGICAL EVALUATION OF REFERENCE MODELSUSING THE BUNGE-WAND-WEBER MODEL

摘要

Within the information systems field, reference models have been known for many years. A reference modelis a conceptual framework and may be used as a blueprint for information systems development. Despite therelevance of reference model quality, little research has been undertaken on their systematical evaluation. Inthis paper, we propose an approach to evaluate reference models based on the Bunge-Wand-Weber ontology.We demonstrate that this application is possible and useful for model evaluation and several other areas. Themain idea of our approach is the ontological normalization of a reference model. An ontological normalizationis comparable with the normalization of a database schema but considers the structure of reality and nottechnical aspects. The ontological normalization of a reference model consists of four steps: (1) Developinga transformation mapping, (2) Identifying ontological modeling deficiencies, (3) Transforming the referencemodel, and (4) Assessing the results. Although our approach is based on sound theory, we argue that thisapproach is not inherently superior to other approaches of reference model evaluation.