Evolution of Business System Analysis Techniques
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
A relational model of data for large shared data banks
Communications of the ACM
A method for describing information required by the database design process
SIGMOD '76 Proceedings of the 1976 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data
Systems for Large Data Bases
An overview of recent data base research
ACM SIGMIS Database
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The problem of designing a valid and consistent information model for a data base is examined. An information model is considered valid if it, from the user point of view, adequatly represents the relevant portion of reality and if it has an acceptable evolution tolerance. A consistent model has components which, at any time, satisfy certain interdependence constraints. After an outline of the design process in general and a discussion of some of its major problems we introduce four 'facets' of existing conceptual bases for information modeling. These are (1) Abstraction levels, (2) Degree of integration, (3) Scope of the model and (4) Time perspective. The second half of the paper offers some thoughts on the effect that these four facets may have on information model validation and consistency verification.