Accommodating mesodata into conceptual modelling methodologies
Information and Software Technology
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Nowadays relational database schemas are designedby using well-known database design techniques suchas the Entity Relationship Model and the normalizationprocess. The result schemas can be guaranteed to haveminimum redundancies if the fifth normal form (5NF)is achieved. However, in more recent database schemadesign such as the design of object database schema,the concern about minimum redundancies does notseem to be an important issue. Functionaldependencies may still appear in an object class of theclass diagram thus introduce update anomalies. Thispape rfirst presents the use of NIAM, a well-establishedconceptual schema model, as a conceptualmodel for the design of object databases. Atransformation from a NIAM to an OODB schema withminimum redundancy is presented. The conceptualschema can also be transformed into ExtensibleMarkup Language (XML) which is originally alanguage for document management. However, it nowgains popularity in database representation. It isparticularly useful as a data format when anapplication must communicate with anotherapplication. This paper also presents the NIAMconceptual schema model as a conceptual design toolfor XML schema. A software tool that allows users tocreate NIAM schemas and generate object and XMLschemas is develpoed.