Automated Reasoning on Conceptual Schemas (Dagstuhl Seminar 13211)

This report documents the outcomes of the Dagstuhl Seminar 13211 "Automated Reasoning on Conceptual Schemas". The quality of an information system is largely determined early in the development cycle, i.e., during requirements specification and conceptual modeling since errors introduced at these stages are usually much more expensive to correct than errors made during design or implementation. Thus, it is desirable to prevent, detect, and correct errors as early as possible in the development process by assessing the correctness of the conceptual schemas built. The high expressivity of conceptual schemas requires to adopt automated reasoning techniques to support the designer in this important task. Research in this area can be classified according to two different dimensions. On the one hand, according to the language used to specify the conceptual schema. On the other hand, according to whether reasoning is performed on the structural schema alone, or also on its dynamic aspects. We find interesting and promising results from all these communities which have usually worked isolatedly. Therefore, the aim of this seminar was to allow them to communicate with each other to avoid duplicate effort and to exploit synergies. The research questions that were pursued in the seminar included, among others: (i) Does it make sense to renounce to decidability to be able to handle the full expressive power of the language used with and without textual integrity constraints? (ii) Which is the current state of the achievements as far as reasoning on the behavioral part is concerned? (iii) Are the existing techniques and tools ready to be used in an industrial environment? (iv) Which are the new challenges for automated reasoning on conceptual schemas?