Generating Significant Examples for Conceptual Schema Validation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method for generating significant examples to validate conceptual schemas, especially focusing on cardinality constraints, aiding novice modelers in avoiding common errors.

Contribution

It proposes a syntactic mechanism and algorithms for generating illustrative examples and detecting schema flaws, enhancing schema validation processes.

Findings

Generated examples illustrate allowed instance combinations.

Algorithm detects potential schema flaws.

Supports validation of cardinality constraints.

Abstract

This report bases itself on the idea of using concrete examples to verify conceptual schemas, and in particular cardinality constraints. When novice ORM modellers model domains, the selection of proper cardinality constraints for relationship types is quite often prone to errors. In this report we propose a mechanism for the generation of significant examples for selected subschemas. The generated examples are significant in the sense that they illustrate the possible combinations of instances that are allowed with respect to the cardinality constraints on the involved relationship types. In this report we firstly provide a brief informal discussion of the basic idea. Then we present a syntactic mechanism to select the subschema for which example instances are to be generated. This is followed by the actual example generation algorithm itself. We will also present, as a {\em spin-off}, an algorithm that allows us to detect possible flaws in the conceptual schema by calculating the number of instances that can be used to populate the types in the schema.