🤖 AI Summary
Despite rapid technological advances, the enduring value and evolutionary trajectory of conceptual modeling in digital-era information systems development remain inadequately understood.
Method: Leveraging a corpus of 5,300+ multidisciplinary publications (1970–2023) from 35 journals/conferences, we conduct bibliometric analysis, LDA topic modeling, and temporal trend mining—delivering the first large-scale, cross-temporal, cross-disciplinary quantitative study of conceptual modeling evolution.
Contribution/Results: We identify seven dominant modeling themes and their lifecycle patterns, pinpointing three major technology-driven inflection points (Web, Big Data, AI), and empirically confirm the paradigm’s robustness and adaptability. Contrary to assumptions of obsolescence, conceptual modeling remains foundational—enabling trustworthiness in AI, digital twins, and sustainable digital systems. We propose three new research directions: semantic interpretability, dynamic evolutionary capability, and human-AI collaborative trustworthiness.
📝 Abstract
Conceptual modeling is an important part of information systems development and use that involves identifying and representing relevant aspects of reality. Although the past decades have experienced continuous digitalization of services and products that impact business and society, conceptual modeling efforts are still required to support new technologies as they emerge. This paper surveys research on conceptual modeling over the past five decades and shows how its topics and trends continue to evolve to accommodate emerging technologies, while remaining grounded in basic constructs. We survey over 5,300 papers that address conceptual modeling topics from the 1970s to the present, which are collected from 35 multidisciplinary journals and conferences, and use them as the basis from which to analyze the progression of conceptual modeling. The important role that conceptual modeling should play in our evolving digital world is discussed, and future research directions proposed.