What is a conceptual model?

In order to have a clearer understanding of the functioning of a particular system, the designer creates a conceptual model of an application. For this purpose, various documentation, graphs, specifications, diagrams and so on are used. So that you can accurately understand what a conceptual model is, what goals and objectives it pursues, in this article we decided to elaborate on this concept in more detail.

Term meaning

A conceptual model is a specific scheme. It uses various concepts and connections between them in order to form the semantic structure of an object. However, it is worth considering the moment that the conceptual model of the system is abstract. But this is not the only meaning of the term. In addition, there is the concept of "conceptual model of the domain". The meaning of this term is that a list of related concepts is used to describe a sphere. For this purpose, classification of definitions, their characteristics and properties, as well as the laws of the processes occurring in them, are used.

Main goals

It is worth noting that the conceptual model is created primarily to facilitate the perception of information by an ordinary user. In other words, a narrowly detailed and detailed description of the structure's operation is being developed. To achieve this result, you must first make this model the simplest (for this purpose use the minimum number of values). And secondly, try to maximize its focus on the performance of certain tasks (that is, to maximally limit the user's work with non-configurable values in this area).

Basic goals

The conceptual model has the following objectives:

- Create a simple, consistent and easy-to-use and study structure. For this purpose, task areas are divided into concepts that can be used to work with different objects.

- Maintain the sustainability of terminology. This is achieved by the fact that the conceptual data model, consisting initially of the vocabulary of terms, is used to recognize each action and object that is painted in the program.

As it is proved, the non-use of this terminology leads to the fact that several concepts are used to define one scheme, or the same term is used to describe various schemes.

Development of a conceptual model

This process is to create the original scheme. In the future, the developer will be able to apply it to implement the software. To give a description of a complex system, a certain algorithm of the behavior of the components of the given system is used, thus reflecting their interaction with each other. There are times when the information contained in the description is not enough to understand and study the object of modeling. To correct this omission, one should go back to the stage of compiling the table of contents and add those data, the absence of which was established when the object was formalized. And, as practice shows, there can be several such returns. By the way, the creation of schemes for simple structures considered in the article is not justified. In the simulation simulation, various conceptual models with different structurization have found application. Most often their schemes are guided by mathematical theories. This leads to problems in choosing an appropriate system for describing the necessary modeling object. Thus, for example, it is customary to use process-oriented structures for discrete circuits. To create a continuous design, use flow diagrams of system dynamics. The conceptual data model is developed using a special language, which is fixed in the structural structure itself. To simplify the construction and programming of a particular scheme, specially developed techniques of programming technology are used.

Important Components

You should know that the conceptual model includes a number of important elements. First of all, they include the study of objects and the study of their actions. That is, the user should study the list of all applications visible to him and manipulations that he can perform on each object individually. Naturally, in the development of the system, other objects may (and probably will) be present, but they will be hidden from the user.

Conclusion

In some cases, when creating objects of a conceptual model, the principle of structural organization of multi-level systems is used. Thus, the developer achieves an easier design of a user-friendly object. Such a construction facilitates the management of the implementation of the system, and also facilitates the creation of application command structures. That is, the developer can determine what actions are applicable to different objects, which of them can be generalized. This makes it possible to make the structure of the commands the most accessible to the user. That is, instead of studying a large number of object-oriented commands, you only need to master the generalized ones. Analyzing all of the above, we can say that the conceptual model is just a scheme that determines the properties of the elements of the planned structure and its cause-and-effect relationships necessary to achieve the stated design goal.