Stigmergy-Based Collaborative Conceptual Modeling

In software engineering, the conceptual model captures key concepts and relationships between concepts in a problem domain. In general, a conceptual model is usually constructed by one or several modelers, and the quality of the constructed model has a tight relation with the modelers´ personal experience and capability. In this paper, we propose a stigmergy-based collaborative conceptual modeling approach to weakening the correlation between the quality of a conceptual model and the modelers´ personal experience and capability. The main characteristic of this approach is twofold. First, this approach provides an indirect interaction method to solve the communication problem among the temporal and topographical distributed modelers in a global context. Second, this approach alleviates the impact of low-quality elements in the model constructed by individual modelers and helps to elicit the conceptual model effectively and efficiently. We have developed a web-based tool to support this approach, and conducted a case study to evaluate the feasibility of this approach.