Evaluation of collaborative modeling processes for knowledge articulation and alignment

The evaluation of modeling processes for years has focused on assessing the outcome of modeling, while the process of modeling itself hardly has been subject of examination. Only in recent years, with rising interest in collaborative conceptual modeling approaches, the process of modeling has gained more attention. Different streams of research have focused on examining the sequence of model manipulations or have considered the collaborative modeling to be a negotiation process and shaped evaluation criteria accordingly. This article proposes to add the perspective of articulation and alignment of the topic of modeling to the potential foci of evaluation. Its contribution is to show, how existing research originating in theories of co-construction of knowledge can be adapted for this purpose and how the adopted perspective is complementary to those already available in related work. A comparative field study applying different evaluation methods on a single real world showcase is presented to show the practical applicability of the approach and allows to identify potential for the combination of previously unrelated analytical dimensions.