Abstract.
This paper examines the problem of establishing a formal relationship of abstraction and refinement between abstract enterprise models and the concrete information systems which implement them. It introduces and justifies a number of reasonableness requirements, which turn out to justify the use of category theoretic concepts, particularly fibrations, to precisely specify a semantics for enterprise models which enables them to be considered as abstractions of the conceptual models from which the implementing information systems are built. The category-theoretic concepts are developed towards the problem of testing whether a system satisfies the fibration axioms, and are applied to case studies to demonstrate their practicability.
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Received: 23 June 1997 / 1 June 2001
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Colomb, R., Dampney, C. & Johnson, M. Category-theoretic fibration as an abstraction mechanism in information systems. Acta Informatica 38, 1–44 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/PL00013321
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/PL00013321