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. A large proportion of the 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.

However, despite of all these intelligent contributions and the huge 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.