Book excerpt: The purpose of this book is to disseminate the research results and best practice from researchers and practitioners interested in and working on modeling methods and methodologies. Though the need for such studies is well recognized, there is a paucity of such research in the literature. What specifically distinguishes this book is that it looks at various research domains and areas such as enterprise, process, goal, object-orientation, data, requirements, ontology, and component modeling, to provide an overview of existing approaches and best practices in these conceptually closely-related fields. *Note: This book is part of a series entitled ?Advanced Topics in Database Research".