Research on conceptual modeling: Themes, topics, and introduction to the special issue

Conceptual modeling continues to evolve as researchers and practitioners reflect on the challenges of modeling and implementing data-intensive problems that appear in business and in science. These challenges of data modeling and representation are well-recognized in contemporary applications of big data, ontologies, and semantics, along with traditional efforts associated with methodologies, tools, and theory development. This introduction contains a review of some current research in conceptual modeling and identifies emerging themes. It also introduces the articles that comprise this special issue of papers from the 32nd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2013).