Finding Entities寻找实体.pptVIP

Finding Entities What is an Entity An entity is a person, place, object, event, or concept about which the organization wishes to record data. Entities should be things that are readily recognized by anyone working in the enterprise. Some Entity Rules An Entity 1. Must be within the scope of the system 2. Must have at least one non-key attribute Where to Begin To begin, we must have some form of information that we can use in our analysis. Collect information about the major business functions and processes. We can use questionnaires, interviews, observations etc. Where to Begin Another good source of information for data modeling can be obtained by collecting any forms that are used by the enterprise. These forms provide valuable information on what data is important to the enterprise and how it is grouped. Where to Begin Once we have a concise picture of the processes we are going to model, we can begin the iterative process of finding the entities that are necessary to support the enterprise. The Steps Involved 1. Identify the system information a. User interviews b. Paper and screen documents c. Previous system documentation The Steps Involved 2. Identify entities a. Analysis of English grammar -- Entity-Relationship Diagrams b. Heuristics c. Normalization process Analyze the Grammer Using the table on the next slide, find the entities, attributes and relationships from the description and other information we have gathered about the enterprise. Use this table to start Sentence Restructuring Next we do some sentence restructuring: Convert any sentence in the following form: “There are . . . X in Y” into “Y has . . . X” Sentence Restructuring Example “There are more than 200 employees in every department.” “Every department has more than 200 employees.” More Restructuring If the English sentence says, “The X of Y is Z” Y is an Entity X is either an Attribute or an Entity, depending on what type of “Z” it is. If “Z” is a proper