Expressing a temporal entity-relationship model as a traditional entity-relationship model

Abstract

According to the approach of conceptual database design, database models are designed from the Entity-Relationship (ER) model. However, the real world of most database applications are related to the temporal aspects, so data modelling using the ER diagrams had encountered many difficulties. In an attempt to more naturally support the modeling of temporal aspects of information, many different temporal ER models have been proposed such as RAKE, TEER, TimeER… In order to design a logical data model, we have to develop a new conversion method. To solve the problem, this paper addresses expressing a temporal ER model as a traditional ER model. Thus, it provides a mapping algorithm to convert a temporal model to a traditional ER model. Hereby, we can inherit conversion method from a traditional ER model to a logical data model. In this paper, the TimeER model is used to represent temporal ER models, because it provide built-in support for capturing temporal aspects more sufficiently compared to other models.