How to Formalize It? - Formalization Principles for Information System Development Methods

Although the need for formalisation of modelling techniques is generally recognised, not much literature is devoted to the actual process involved. This is comparable to the situation in mathematics where focus is on proofs but not on the process of proving. This paper tries to accomodate for this lacuna and provides essential principles for the process of formalisation in the context of modelling techniques as well as a number of small but realistic formalisation case studies. Keywords: Formalization, Methodologies, Information Systems 1 Introduction Traditionally, information systems has been a rather informal field of study and many methods and techniques have been introduced without a formal foundation. The past decade, however, has seen a shift from informal approaches to more formal approaches towards information systems development. On the one hand, a number of new formal approaches have been introduced and on the other hand a number of initially informal techniques have been ..