Morphing Conceptual Models

Advancement of morphing in the Boston conceptual modelling software

Victor Morgante
2 min readSep 26, 2021

Just over 20 years ago I was employed as a business analyst and took a conceptual model to an architect for review and approval. He took one look at it and asked if I could do the same conceptual model in another language from the one I had drawn the model in.

That was the start of the Boston conceptual modelling software. I walked away huffing to myself that one language is as good as another and lamenting, in advance, the time I would have to spend translating the same conceptual information from one language to another.

The vision of Boston was to do a conceptual model once, in Object-Role Modelling and then have software translate the model into any compatible conceptual modelling language automatically.

Long story short, I put the idea on the shelf for 7 years and decided to dive in in 2007. ORM Studio became Richmond became Boston and 8 years later Boston was morphing Object-Role Models to Entity Relationship Diagrams and Property Graph Schema. I can safely say that the inspirational concept came in an instant, but that, based on experience, it takes years to develop half decent Object-Role Modeling software and implement the thesis.

Anyway, I’ve made some upgrades to the morphing facility in Boston and it now morphs multiple model elements at the same time. Enjoy…

Morphing Conceptual Models in the Boston conceptual modelling software. Image by author.

Thanks for reading. As time permits I will write more on conceptual modelling, Object-Role Modelling and my pet subjects isomorphism and homomorphism.

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