Welcome

The scientific community of conceptual modeling has been dealing with the philosophical, theoretical, epistemological and practical foundations of its field from the very beginning. Many contributions to the early ER conferences make this clear. Over time, these were gradually joined by contributions dealing with practical issues, methods and techniques of modeling language development, application, tool support, and evaluation. The current focus is on questions related to the interplay between conceptual modeling and the development of LLM-based AI systems. 

Although the list of relevant works provided on this website is by no means exhaustive, it does offer an initial glimpse into the breadth of the field.

However, despite of all such intelligent contributions and the extensive published body of knowledge central questions still remain unanswered. This applies even to the most obvious question, namely “When is a model a conceptual one?” For practitioners using a particular modeling tool, this may be irrelevant. Scientists, however, should delve deeper into their field.

We therefore need a comprehensive model theory together with a modeling methodology for the application of modeling in practice, comparable to what is known in German as Konstruktionslehre as a methodology of construction alongside construction theory. 

With the workshop series “Fundamentals of Conceptual Modeling”, which we successfully launched as part of ER2025 and will now continue at ER 2026 in St. John’s (Canada), we are addressing these issues.

Other initiatives were, e.g., the Mini-Dagstuhl Seminar at CBI 2024 (pp. 301-325), the Dagstuhl Seminar
“Next Generation Domain Specific Modeling: Principles, Methods, and Applications“, the “Bolzano  Summer of Knowledge” 2020/2021 schools, or events of the GI Cross-sectional TC on modeling (QFAM).