[AISWorld] Journal of Database Management (JDM) Special Issue: Ontological Analysis in Conceptual Modeling

[Siau, Keng L.]

Journal of Database Management (JDM)
Editor-in-Chief: Keng Siau, Missouri University of Science and Technology 


Special Issue on Ontological Analysis in Conceptual Modeling

Special Issue Editors:

Andrew Burton-Jones, University of Queensland 
Peter Green, Queensland University of Technology 
Jeffrey Parsons, Memorial University of Newfoundland 
Keng Siau, Missouri University of Science and Technology

The call for "native" theories in information systems has been strong over the discipline's history (Straub 2012). One answer to this call has been the ontological theory (drawing on the ontology of Mario Bunge) Wand and Weber introduced to the field in three seminal papers (1990, 1993, 1995). This work established three views on information systems as representations of human perceptions of a domain of interest: the representation model, the state tracking model, and the good decomposition model.

This stream of work has generated a great deal of interest, and produced many papers using Wand and Weber's models to evaluate important phenomena in information systems. Notably, researchers have used ontological analysis to suggest how grammars for conceptual modeling and database design might be modified to be ontologically sound and they have evaluated the effects of these modifications on how well models are understood.

As it has been 25 years since the early work in this area, this is an opportune time to assess the contribution ontological analysis has made to the IS field over the past quarter century and to look forward to new areas of application. We invite submissions that consider this issue from a variety of perspectives, including (but not limited to):


  *   Theoretical contributions of ontological analysis
  *   Practical contributions of ontological analysis
  *   New areas of application of ontological analysis
  *   Comparative studies of different ontological foundations
  *   Design science research based on ontological analysis
  *   Open questions in the use of ontological analysis


Important Dates:

Submission Deadline: June 30, 2016
Initial screening by Guest Editors: July 31, 2016 
First round of review: October 31, 2016 
Second round of review: March 1, 2017 
Final Decision: April 15, 2017


Submission Procedure:

Please email your paper as an attachment to jdm at mst.edu and use "Submission to JDM's Ontological Analysis Special Issue" as the Subject of the email.  JDM uses a double-blind review process and the authors' should not reveal their identities in the papers.


References

Straub, D. (2012). Does MIS Have Native Theory?" MIS Quarterly, 36(2), iii-xii.
Wand, Y. and R. Weber (1990). An Ontological Model of an Information System. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 16(11), 1282-1292.
Wand, Y. and R. Weber (1993). On the Ontological Expressiveness of Information Systems Analysis and Design Grammars. Journal of Information Systems, 3, 217-237.
Wand, Y. and R. Weber (1995). On the Deep Structure of Information Systems. Information Systems Journal, 5, 203-223.