Information Model

In software engineering, the information model refers to the representation of the relationships, concepts, operations and rules to specify the data semantics for a selected domain of the discourse.  It could provide sharable, organized and stable structure of the data requirements for the domain context.  The term information model is generally used for the models of the separate individual things like building, facilities, process plants and many more. In those cases the model or concept is specialized to the Plant Information Model, Building Information Model, Facility Information Model and many more. Such an information model is the integration of the model of the facility with the documents and information about the facility.

Within the field of the software engineering and the data modeling, the information model is the abstract, the formal representation of the entity kinds which comprises their properties, the operations and the relationship which could be performed on them. The entity kinds in the model might be kinds of real-world objects, like devices in the network, or they might themselves be abstract, like for the entities utilized in the billing system. Generally, they are utilized in order to model a constrained domain which could be described by the closed set of properties, entity types, operations and relationships.

The information model offers formalism to the explanation of the problem domain without restraining how that explanation is mapped to the actual implementation in the software. There might be several mappings of the information model. These types of mappings are known as data models, despite of whether they are object models (example using UML), XML schemas or entity relationship models.  The information models are used for various purposes and for designing.

Questionnaire:

• What is information model?
• Explain more about the entity relationship model?
• Explain about information model.