xii Preface

As information modeling takes a more prominent role in organizations and the implications become more widespread, researchers, practitioners and academicians alike will need to have access to the most up-to-date research and practice in information modeling techniques and applications. The chapters in this book address the timely topics of unified modeling language, enterprise resource planning and ontological design and other relevant applications and technologies related to modern information modeling techniques. The authors represent a wide variety of perspectives and provide insights from many different cultures and organizational and industry backgrounds. Chapter 1 entitled, " Evaluating an ISD Methodology for Software Packages " by Kees van Slooten and Marcel Bruins of the University of Twente (Netherlands) compares the Software Package Development Methodology (SPDM) to a method engineering framework, which is a discipline used to construct new methods from parts of existing methods by considering situational factors. The chapter also reports the results of a questionnaire which asked users of SPDM their opinions on the problems and quality of SPDM Chapter 2 entitled, " Modelling Molecular Biological Information: Ontologies and Ontological Design Patterns " by Jacqueline Renee Reich of the University of Manchester (United Kingdom) describes the use of ontologies and ontological design patterns to model molecular biological information. The chapter describes the useful features of ODPs and provides a concrete example of one, namely the Terminological Hierarchy ODP which is related to the informal ontology of immunology. Kong presents a concept acquisition modeling approach to facilitate the acquisition, classification and representation of e-commerce concepts. The authors propose a systematic way to make comparisons between concepts based upon an understanding of their semantics. Chapter 4 entitled, " An Object-Oriented Approach to Conceptual Hypermedia Modeling " by Wilfried Lemahieu of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) introduces the Maintainable, End user Friendly, Structured Hypermedia (MESH) approach to hypermedia modeling and navigation. This approach avoids the typical