Empirical Evaluation of the Quality of Conceptual Models Based on User Perceptions: A Case Study in the Transport Domain

Today, many companies design and maintain a vast amount of conceptual models. It has been also observed that such large model collections exhibit serious quality issues in industry practice. A number of quality frameworks have been proposed in the literature, but the practice is that practitioners continue to evaluate conceptual models in an ad-hoc and subjective way, based on common sense and experience. Therefore, there is a lack of empirical works in the evaluation of conceptual frameworks. This paper reports an empirical qualitative study on the evaluation of the quality of a conceptual framework in the domain of transport logistics, using existent quality evaluation frameworks. The results show how the users perceive the ease of understanding, the usefulness, the perceived semantic quality and satisfaction with the models included in the conceptual framework. The results also provided their view on advantages, challenges and improvements to be performed in the framework