Goal-Oriented Conceptual Database Design

We present details of a goal-oriented process for database requirements analysis. This process consists of a number of steps, spanning the spectrum from high-level stakeholder goal analysis to detailed conceptual schema design. The paper shows how goal modeling contributes to a systematic scoping and analysis of the application domain to elicit an initial domain of discourse, from which the conceptual schema is derived by transformation, using a series of schema design operations. Moreover, a goal-oriented design strategy is proposed to structure the transformational schema design according to a set of user defined design priorities (including data quality dimensions), also modeled as goals. The proposed process is illustrated step-by-step using a running example from the design of a real-world, industrial biological database. We also report early progress towards building full tool support, by presenting a prototype that captures and stores design sessions in a queryable form. This ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: RE
• Authors: Lei Jiang, Thodoros Topaloglou, Alexander Borgida, John Mylopoulos
• Keywords: Conceptual Schema, Conceptual Schema Design, RE 2007, Schema Design, Software Engineering