The keynote speakers for ER'97 were both active conceptual modelers early in their careers. Dr. Alan G. Merten is currently the president of George Mason University, and Dr. Michael L. Brodie is a senior staff scientist at GTE Laboratories. In addition, four workshops on topics of current interest will be offered immediately following the conference. Contact the appropriate organizer if you are interested in participating in any of these workshops. There will be four workshops held simultaneously on Thursday, November 6 and continuing Friday, November 7.
Workshops require an additional registration fee.
Conceptual modeling and knowledge representation methodologies offer a promising approach to this problem. While offering rigor, clarity, and manageability, many approaches to modeling require non-specialists to learn arcane symbols or terminology in order to participate in the modeling activity. This workshop will focus on using cognition to understand existing conceptual modeling techniques, to guide the design of new techniques, and to provide criteria for evaluating techniques and methods. Researchers are devoting increasingly more energy to the problems of behavioral modeling in conjunction with traditional conceptual data modeling. The goals of this workshop are to better understand theoretical aspects of behavioral models, and to use that understanding to suggest transformations that would be helpful in the design of active systems.