Re: Object-Role Modeling?

"Mikito Harakiri" <mikharakiri_nospaum_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:1120593464.843425.65810_at_g44g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Dan wrote:
> > As a way to describe a problem domain with end users, why hasn't ORM
> > taken off? From what I have read of it, it seems that it would be the
> > place to start, then tweak on ER layer...
>
> Maybe because ORM/ER were never sucessful as comunnication tool with
> end users? For that matter, were ORM/ER sucessful in anything else?

Comparison of UML and ORM for data modeling (as opposed to application object modeling):
www.orm.net/pdf/JDM99.pdf

From an article by Alan Kotok about modeling for an HR system for 4 million employees:
http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2001/12/12/kotok.html?page=2

"UML advocates got an even sharper shock when one of the key developers of HR-XML spoke at length about the inability of UML to meet the needs of a large-scale human resources systems project undertaken by the U.S. Department of Defense. Enrique Kortright, of the U.S. Navy Space and Warfare Command's Information Technology Center, discussed how the initial modeling of the planned Defense Integrated Human Resources System (DIMHRS) ran into problems using UML. This project is a large, complex undertaking, eventually serving 3 to 4 million employees, with thousands of entry points and concurrent users, and exchanging data with finance, education, health care, retirement, and civilian personnel systems.

Kortright said the goal of modeling this system was to capture the business knowledge of human resource professionals, and like Bob Sutor of IBM, he had to evaluate the available standards against the needs of that project. However, he found UML limited in its ability to record complex business behavior. Based on this experience, he said UML was both too complex and too restrictive and forced the modelers to make decisions irrelevant to the overall goals of the project, such as classifying professional human resources knowledge between classes and attributes. Kortright also discovered that human resources experts could not understand the UML notation. The DIMHRS designers ended up using another graphical modeling language called Object Role Modeling, which like UML uses a graphical notation but is more expressive." Received on Thu Jul 14 2005 - 09:01:09 CEST