The Meaning of Modeling Concepts: The Left Triptych Wing

The meaning of a conceptual model is derived from the linguistic semantics of the modeling language used, the intension of the modeling concepts employed, and an explicit specification of these concepts that is understood within a community of practice. The triptych paradigm of conceptual modeling reflects these three dimensions of meaning as represented in the triptych wings of ‘Language Wing’, ‘Model Wing’, and ‘Meaning Wing’. In this paper, we investigate how the specification, that is, the ‘grounding’ of the modeling concepts, can be achieved based on these triptych wings. Our considerations should help the development of information systems to avoid costly future system changes that could occur due to the lack of a comprehensive understanding of an application and its inherent semantics during modeling. When developing a system, specifying the concepts used for modeling as precisely as possible increases the likelihood that the resulting information system will meet the application requirements.