A Semiotic Approach for Guiding the Visualizing of Time and Space in Enterprise Models

Even if geographical aspects such as location are included already in the Zachman framework (as the where-perspective), it is not common to have detailed geographical aspects included in enterprise models. Cartography is the science of visualizing geographical information in maps. Traditionally the field has not included conceptual relationships that you find in enterprise models. Both cartography and enterprise modelling have developed guidelines for obtaining high quality visualizations. SEQUAL is a quality framework developed for understanding quality of models and modelling languages based on semiotic theory. In cartography such frameworks are not common. An adaptation of SEQUAL in the context of cartographic maps called MAPQUAL has been presented earlier. Differences between quality of maps and quality of conceptual models, pointing to guidelines for combined representations have been performed, and we try in this paper to investigate the utility of these guidelines in a simple trial. The result of the trial is presented, indicating that it is possible to represent conceptual, temporal, and spatial aspects in the same models in many ways, but that the choice of main perspective should depend on participant appropriateness.