In order for the user to have a clearer understanding of the functioning of a particular system, the designer creates a conceptual model of a particular application. For these purposes, various documentation, graphs, specifications, diagrams, and so on are used. So that you can understand exactly what a conceptual model is, what goals and objectives it pursues, in this article we decided to dwell on this concept in more detail.
Meaning of term
A conceptual model is a certain scheme. In order to form the semantic structure of an object, it uses various concepts and relationships between them. However, it should be taken into account that the conceptual model of the system is abstract. But this is not the only meaning of the term. In addition, there is the concept of "conceptual domain model". The meaning of this term is that a list of related concepts is used to describe any area. For these purposes, the classification of definitions, their characteristics and properties, as well as the laws of the processes occurring in them are used.
Main Tasks
It is worth noting that the conceptual model is created primarily to facilitate the perception of information by an ordinary user. In other words, a narrowly focused and detailed description of the operation of the structure is developed. To achieve this result, it is necessary first of all to make this model as simple as possible (for this purpose, the minimum number of values is used). And secondly, try to focus it as much as possible on the performance of certain tasks (that is, to limit the user's work with non-appearing values in this area as much as possible).
Main goals
The conceptual model has the following goals:
- Create a structure that is simple, consistent and easy to use and learn. To this end, task areas are divided into concepts that can be used to work with different objects.
- Keep terminology stable. This is achieved by the fact that the conceptual data model, which initially consists of a dictionary of terms, is used to recognize each action and object described in the program.
It has been proven that not using this terminology results in multiple terms being used to define the same schema, or the same term being used to describe different schemas.
Development of the conceptual model
This process is to create the initial schema. In the future, the developer can use itfor software implementation. To give a description of a complex system, a certain algorithm of the behavior of the components of this system is used, thus reflecting their interaction with each other. There are times when the information contained in the description is not enough to understand and study the object of modeling. To correct this omission, one should return to the stage of compiling the table of contents and add the data, the absence of which was established during the formalization of the object. Moreover, as practice shows, there can be several such returns. By the way, the creation of the schemes considered in the article for simple structures is not justified.
In simulation modeling, different conceptual models with different structuring have been used. Most often, their schemes are guided by mathematical theories. This leads to problems in choosing an appropriate system for describing the required modeling object. So, for example, for discrete circuits, it is customary to use process-oriented structures. To make a continuous construction, flow diagrams of system dynamics are used. The conceptual data model is developed using a special language, which is fixed in the structural structure itself. In order to simplify the construction and programming of a particular circuit, specially developed techniques of programming technology are used.
Important Components
Be aware that the conceptual model includes a number of important elements. First of all, they arethe study of objects and the study of their actions. That is, the user must study the list of all applications visible to him and the manipulations that he can perform on each object separately. Naturally, other objects may (and most likely will) be present in the development of the system, but they will be hidden from the user.
Conclusion
In some cases, when creating objects of the conceptual model, the principle of the structural organization of multilevel systems is used. In this way, the developer achieves an easier design of a user-friendly object. Such a construction helps to control the implementation of the system, and also facilitates the creation of application command structures. That is, the developer can determine which actions are applicable to various objects, which of them can be generalized. This makes it possible to make the command structure more accessible to the user. That is, instead of learning a huge number of object-oriented commands, you just need to master the generalized ones. Analyzing all of the above, we can say that the conceptual model is just a scheme that determines the properties of the elements of the planned structure and its cause-and-effect relationships necessary to achieve the design goal.
