Automated Conceptual Data Modeling Using Association Rule Mining
Yoon-Ho Son, In‐Kyu Kim, Namgyu Kim · The Journal of Information Systems · 2009
Data modeling can be regarded as a series of processes to abstract real-world business concerns. The conceptual modeling phase is often regarded as the most difficult stage in the entire modeling process, because quite different conceptual models may be produced even for similar business domains based on users' varying requirements and the data modelers' diverse perceptions of the requirements. This implies that an object considered as an entity in one domain may be considered as an attribute in another, and vice versa. However, many traditional knowledge-based automated database design systems unfortunately fail to construct appropriate Entity-Relationship Diagrams(ERDs) for a given set of requirements due to the rigid assumption that an object should be classified as an entity if it has been classified as an entity in previous applications. In this paper, we propose an alternative automation system which can generate ERDs from business descriptions using association rule mining technique. Our system can be differentiated from the traditional ones in that our system can perform data modeling only based on business description written by domain workers, rather than relying on any kind of knowledge base. Since the proposed system can produce various versions of ERDs from the same business descriptions simultaneously, users can have the opportunity to choose one of the ERDs as being the most appropriate, based on their business environment and requirements. We performed a case study for personnel management in a university to evaluate the practicability of the proposed system This paper summarizes the result of it in the experiment section.