The basic NIAM philosophy is: information analysis intends to model the communication about a certain Universe of Discourse (UoD) but does not intend to model the UoD itself. Consequently all existing elements in NIAM must be consistent with this philosophy. Furthermore NIAM must be extended with new elements, such as the complete redundancy free recording of the structure of the declarative sentences spoken by the user expressing (elementary) facts about the UoD. This implies the need to be able to model complex identification structures occurring in this communication. In this paper we present Fully Communication Oriented NIAM (FCO-NIAM) as a possible solution covering all the above-mentioned desirability's. We use a generic FCO-NIAM metagrammar (GenMG), which not only enables us to treat both FCO-NIAM and the Relational Model from a single point of view but also to design a simple CASE-tool architecture. This architecture allows the registration of information grammars (IG's) in these Data Models and the transformation of NIAM IG's into relational schemata including the sentence structures via simple updates in the population of the GenMG. Presently FCO-NIAM is both taught in college-level educations and used in practice on a broad scale in the Dutch NIAM-scene.

Title: Fully Communication Oriented NIAM

Written by: Guido Bakema, Jan Pieter Zwart, Harm van der Lek

Published: NIAM-ISDM working conference 1994

Language: English