Conceptual modelling has been changed over years. Nowadays conceptual modelling in the small has become state of the art for specialists and educated application engineers. Conceptualisations have been developed for almost any aspect of an information system (structuring, functionality, interactivity, distribution, architectural components), for most of the implementation decisions such as tuning or performance improvement, for many facets or viewpoints on the application domain etc. The area of conceptual modelling became a science for typical small-range applications with small schemata. Large schemata typically grow incrementally or are a result of migration or integration of schemata or are obtained after consolidation of applications. Typical industrial applications such as SAP R/3 use thousands or tens of thousands database types and have schemata that are not easy to handle, to maintain, to evolve or to map to logical or physical languages at the implementation level. Conceptualisation in the large is typically performed by many modelers and teams. It also includes architectural aspects within applications. At the same time quality, configuration and versioning of models developed so far become an issue.

Conceptual modelling in the large has been mainly developed within companies that handle large and complex applications. It covers a large variety of aspects such as models of structures, of business processes, of interaction among applications and with users, of components of systems, and of abstractions or of derived models such as data warehouses and OLAP applications. We develop new architectural techniques to conceptual modelling in the large.