The Effect of Domain Familiarity on Modelling Roles: an Empirical Study

Conceptual modelling (CM) involves analysts working with domain experts to create a representation of a domain called a conceptual model. We address two issues in CM research. The first deals with the semantics that conceptual models convey. We propose guidelines for how analysts can reflect the semantics of a “role” in a conceptual model using the extended entity relationship (EER) method. Roles are important in organizations, but analysts have little guidance about how to model them. The second issue is the extent to which readers’ prior familiarity with the domain shown in a model affects their understanding of the model. We conducted a laboratory study to determine how domain familiarity affects users’ understanding of conceptual models that represent roles. Our results indicate that conceptual models developed in accordance with our guidelines show roles more clearly but that the benefit of doing so depends on model readers’ familiarity with the modeled domain. In particular, our guidelines will be most useful when users have moderate knowledge of the domain shown in the model. When users are very familiar with the domain, the guidelines do not seem to have much benefit. However, when users have very little knowledge of the domain, the guidelines do help to a certain extent.