Verifying Conceptual Domain Models with Human Computation: A Case Study in Software Engineering

Abstract

Conceptual domain models, such as taxonomies, knowledge graphs or Extended Entity Relationship (EER) diagrams are core to all information systems. The task of verifying the correctness of these models is of high interest to the knowledge and software engineering communities and attracted the first solution approaches using human computation. Yet, since these solutions are published within the boundaries of their communities, there is a lack of concerted work on this topic. As a first step to alleviate this status quo, we formalize the problem of verifying conceptual models and propose a generic approach (VeriCoM) to solve it with human computation techniques. We show how VeriCoM was applied in a software engineering use case focusing on verifying the correctness of an EER diagram against a system specification document. An evaluation of VeriCoM in a series of four workshops within one controlled experiment performed with a crowd of semi-experts lead to the identification of a set of defects with precision of 73% and a recall from a Gold Standard defect set of 63%.