Abstract
We apply recent work on referring expression types to the issue of identification in Conceptual Modelling. In particular, we consider how such types yield a separation of concerns in a setting where an Information System based on a conceptual schema is to be mapped to a relational schema plus SQL queries. We start from a simple object-centered representation (as in semantic data models), where naming is not an issue because everything is self-identified (possibly using surrogates). We then allow the analyst to attach to every class a preferred “referring expression type”, and to specify uniqueness constraints in the form of generalized functional dependencies. We show (1) how a number of well-formedness conditions concerning an assignment of referring expressions can be efficiently diagnosed, and (2) how the above types attached to classes allow a concrete relational schema and SQL queries over it to be derived from a combination of the conceptual schema and queries over it.
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Notes
- 1.
The outline is followed by a sequence of examples that illustrate intuitively the entire process. The remainder of the paper is a somewhat more formal development of the ideas.
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- 3.
We explain the correspondence to a \({\mathcal{C}}_{{{\mathrm{AR}}}}\) schema in the next section.
- 4.
To adhere to SQL’99 syntax, a formulation using a general assertion would be needed in most cases. For formal definitions of constraints, please see [2].
- 5.
Allowing guards to have more than one table name is a straightforward extension.
- 6.
Other options for both \(\mathop {\mathsf {Nm}}\nolimits \) and \(\mathop {\mathsf{Rep}}\nolimits \) are clearly possible, e.g., based on introducing variant record types.
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We assume a non-null default value exists for each concrete domain.
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Borgida, A., Toman, D., Weddell, G. (2016). On Referring Expressions in Information Systems Derived from Conceptual Modelling. In: Comyn-Wattiau, I., Tanaka, K., Song, IY., Yamamoto, S., Saeki, M. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9974. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46397-1_14
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