Rapid Prototyping of Extended Entity-Relationship Models

Abstract

Abstract: The entity-relationship model is considered to be the standard for conceptual design of data in information systems and relational databases. Extended entity-relationship models provide extra concepts such as generalization, dependency and classification. In the context of objectoriented software development, such models are able to represent part of the functionality whereas more operational functionality is implemented in the object-oriented language. In the resulting object-oriented program, however, the original data model is often lost and the relationship and dependency constraints are not enforced. We propose an approach which consists of an active modeling phase and an interactive prototyping phase. The overall result is a model in which the elements have active links to fully operational implementation objects, which in turn are actively constrained by the model. We have developed a system that supports the manual steps in these two phases and fully implements the (semi-)automatic steps