Conceptual Modeling of Electronic Content and Documents in ECM Systems Design: Results from a Modeling Project at Hoval

The implementation of enterprise content management (ECM) software requires careful analysis of an organization’s content and document assets, and conceptual information models can provide substantial input for ECM systems design. In particular, content models can support the documentation of both organizational and technological conditions and can illuminate software-related requirements. Therefore, a conceptual modeling language for electronic content and documents has to meet several conditions: It should facilitate description of how content can be reused in different documents, the creators and users of content, and the software systems involved. In addition, given the vast number of digital assets created and used in today’s organizations, such a language has to safeguard a clear and consistent representation while also being ready for efficient adaptation and maintenance. With the help of the general criteria of conceptual modeling proposed by Becker et al. (e.g., correctness, relevance, clarity), this chapter identifies these and related requirements and argues that they are not sufficiently met by existing modeling approaches. As a response, we propose a novel modeling language that we developed and evaluated during the course of a modeling project at Hoval, to be used in describing electronic content and documents.