Abstract
Object-Role Modelling (ORM) is a framework for modelling and querying information at the conceptual level. It comes to support the design of large-scale industrial applications allowing the users to easily model the domain. The expressiveness of the ORM constraints may lead to implicit consequences that can go undetected by the designer in complex diagrams during the software development life cycle. To avoid these issues we perform the reasoning on ORM diagrams in order to detect relevant formal properties, such as inconsistencies or redundancies, that cause a software quality degradation leading to an increment of development times and costs. In this paper we present an extension of ORM formalisation by Derivation Rules, which are additional ORM constructs that capture some relevant information of the domain that cannot be expressed in standard ORM. Moreover, we provide a tool (UCM Framework) which enables reasoning on conceptual modelling software along with an implemented case of study (ORMiE). © 2017, Springer International Publishing AG.