This presentation celebrates the retirement of Prof. John Mylopoulos from the University of Toronto, after a stellar, 39-year tenure during which he contributed not just to the Artificial Intelligence (AI), Databases, and Software Engineering communities, but to the lives and careers of hundreds of students and colleagues from Toronto and around the world.

This presentation celebrates one aspect of John's career, conceptual modelling in databases, and from my idiosyncratic view starting in the AI and Database Research Groups at the University of Toronto and meandering down several research, academic, industrial, and gastronomic paths with John Mylopoulos.

In the summer of 1980 high in the Colorado Rockies the mountain flowers were blooming, as were ideas of multi-disciplinary conceptual modelling. The Pingree Park Workshop on Data Abstraction, Database, and Conceptual Modelling[1] marked a figurative and literal high point in expectations for the exchange between databases, programming languages, and AI on Conceptual Modelling. Quietly hiking amongst the AI, Database, and Programming Language luminaries such as Ted Codd, Mike Stonebraker, Mary Shaw, Stephen Zilles, Pat Hayes, Bob Balzer, and Peter Deutsch was John Mylopoulos, a luminary himself who inspired and guided, for over three decades, the branch of Conceptual Modelling chronicled in this talk and the associated book chapter [2].

John's thoughtful and insightful path started in AI, reached into Databases and Programming Languages, and then into its more natural home at the time, software engineering. In this talk, I chronicle the leadership provided by John to the field of conceptual modelling. The conceptual modelling work started thirty years ago under John's guidance has had far reaching impact on the research in Software Engineering as well as to its practice in the industry. Based on recent developments in Model-driven Architectures and Agile or Adaptive Software Engineering, John's contributions to Conceptual Modelling will bloom within the next decade in the form of higher-level programming across all of Computer Science and provide a basis for applying his requirements engineering contributions to databases, thus making progress towards the Holy Grail of Problem Solving rather than merely computing.

I conclude the presentation with a characterization of a large-scale industrial information systems modelling and integration challenge faced by the Fortune 500 as a challenge to the Conceptual Modelling community - addressing information systems in real-world scope, scale, and complexity.

[1] Proceedings of the SIGPLAN '76 Conference on Data: Abstraction, Definition and Structure, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, March 22-24, 1976. ACM 1976

[2] John Mylopoulos: Sowing Seeds of Conceptual Modelling in Alex Borgida, Vinay Chaudhri, Paolo Giorgini, Eric Yu (Eds), Conceptual Modeling: Foundations and Applications, Springer, June 2009.