Information systems modelling based on graph-theoretic background

Abstract

The recent tendency in analysis and design of information systems is that the emphasis is placed on the documents that are ubiquitous around information systems and organizations. The proliferation of computer literacy led to the general use of electronic documents. To understand the anticipated behaviour of information systems and the actual operation of an organization, the analysis of documents plays increasingly an important role. The behaviour of information systems can be interpreted in a framework of Enterprise Architecture and its models that are contained in it. Certain parts and entirety of various types of documents are connected to business processes, tasks, roles, and actors within an organization. The tracking of life cycle of documents and representing the complex relationships are essential at both analysis and operation time. We propose a theoretical framework that makes use of previous results of modelling and well-founded mathematical techniques. The basic idea is that the very flexible mathematical structure, the hypergraph, provides a sound groundwork on which a formal structure can be built up through mapping the essential concept, construction, components, and constituents of information systems. Thus, the representations of models for information systems that mapped onto a hypergraph can be analysed by either using more traditional tools as logic and inference rules or by a set of tools belonging to data science later. The paper describes the mapping of the important concepts onto hypergraphs as documents, processes in cases, their models and some rules for verification and validation; the hypergraph description can be interpreted as a concept hypergraph to be subjected for logical reasoning.

Keywords

• Information system modelling
• document-centric modelling
• information system architecture
• Zachman framework
• hypergraphs
• ontology
• description logics
• concept hypergraph