Dear Ken,
It all finally came to fruition the board of Liverpool Univesity, online
program has finally awarded me with Masters degree in software
engineering with merit . I have included below the front page of the
research paper, the title and part of the acknowledgement page.
I am very grateful for all your help in my research. I want to also like
to express my deepest gratitude to the ORM group especially Professor Terry
Halpin. The research would not have been possible with out your guidance
and patient correction when I lost direction.
I will never forget how much it meant to me and how encouraging it
was that you could sacrifice your time to consider looking at my emails, and
models . Your consideration was like a beacon of hope, as I was at the lowest
point of my life because I was confronted with series of health
issues.
Thank you so much again!!!,
Yours truly,
Berhanu Seyoum
ABSTRACT
Towards Ambiguity- Free Conceptual Data Modeling
By
Berhanu Seyoum
Many research has been done with regards to ambiguity in natural language
specification in requirement documents. Based on the description as the basis
of data modeling several solutions had been recommended and applied starting
from automating the natural language in which the document itself is
written in. This problem is context dependent ambiguity, which occurs less
frequently than context independent ambiguity, which requires knowledge of the
domain of discourse. Again the solution using description approach has not
taken into consideration the requirement documents written in high context
cultures and languages. Little attention has also been given to software
engineering ambiguity that may arise as a result of this context independent
ambiguity. The study shows that using the design paradigm and with the
use of Object Role Modeling (ORM) which has a design procedure based on
the first order logic can be used as a better alternative to design
schemas. This method is recommended to circumvent the problem software
engineering ambiguity rather than Unified Modeling Language (UML). The study
also recommends that UML can be used to be the next step in designing the
software for the conceptual schema designed in ORM. A coffee case has
been studied and modeled for a real time automation of the craft of coffee
roasting to show that a consistent global schema is possible using this method
by incorporating schema integration of three models,
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to give many thanks to Professor Kathleen, my DA whose
wisdom and patience has made this paper possible. My gratitude also goes to the
many wonderful teachers and support group of Liverpool University online. I
would like to thank the ORM foundation group, especially Ken Evans for his
guidance. My deepest gratitude also goes to Professor Terry Halpin for his
comments and correction of the single origin coffee model, and above all his
humble and kind heart, in taking the time from his busy schedule to answer my
questions...