Facing the Conceptual Complexities in Business Domain Modeling

This position paper focuses on business domain modeling as part of requirements engineering in software development projects. Domain modeling concerns obtaining and modeling the language (concepts, terminologies; ontologies) used by stakeholders to talk about a domain. Achieving conceptual clarity and consensus among stakeholders is an important yet often neglected part of requirements engineering. Domain modeling can play a key role in supporting it. This does, however, require a nuanced approach aspects of language and language change in domain modeling as well as ambition management concerning its goals. On top of the “classic” approach to modeling singular, stable domains, we distinguish aspects like incremental modeling, modeling of multiple terminologies within a domain, and domain evolution; we elaborate on the first two aspects.