A collaborative conceptual modeling tool based on stigmergy mechanism

Abstract

The conceptual model captures the key concepts in specific problem domains, as well as the important relationships between them. The quality of the conceptual model plays an important role for the success of software development. AAs restricted by personal knowledge and experience, a single modeler usually lacks of capability to build a high-quality conceptual model, especially when the problem domain has a high complexity. The large number of modelers online could help to solve this problem. However, the crowd modelers are temporal and topographical distributed and lack of interaction, which makes it hard for them modeling collaboratively. To address this problem, we developed a tool based on the stigmergy mechanism, which provides an indirect collaboration for online modelers. In this paper, we firstly introduce the architecture of our tool. Our tool helps to make up collaboration for those distributed online crowd through a merge-feedback process. Secondly, we introduce our entropy-based merging approach which is used to merge the models generated by different modelers. Two experiments are conducted to evaluate the feasibility of the merging approach and the stigmergy-based modeling tool.