Resumo
Research and practice in the humanities often involve the management of large and complex bodies of information representing objects of study, hypotheses, work in progress or even conclusions. Although natural language is usually employed to convey these, conceptual models have shown to be useful in a number of situations due to reduced ambiguity and ease of implementation on computing platforms.Within conceptual modelling, however, some areas are still poorly understood and weakly supported by existing technologies. One of these areas is that of “soft issues”, that is, the modelling of issues that are crucial to human understanding, but which have been traditionally regarded as incompatible with or almost intractable by computers. Some examples include the passage of time, the subjective perception of the world, and vagueness.In this tutorial, we use ConML (www.conml.org) to demonstrate how these issues can be tackled, and how conceptual models can be constructed that express temporality, subjectivity and vagueness. ConML is a conceptual modelling language developed with a special orientation towards the humanities and social sciences, and with the aim that specialists with little or no experience in computer science would be able to learn it and use it in very little time.The tutorial will employ theoretical explanations combined with hands-on group exercises, a technique that we have been since 2012 in our postgraduate courses on information modelling for the humanities at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Attendees will acquire practical skills to construct expressive models, as well as the theoretical underpinnings supporting them. They will have access to proven modelling techniques as well as new and experimental findings.
Palabras chave
Subjectivity. Temporality. Vagueness. Conceptual modelling. ConML.