Entity-from-relationship modelling

Abstract

We investigate the problem of the (re-)identification of new entities emerging from the presence of relationships in a conceptual schema. While the general practice is to reify the relation and thus individuating as many individuals as many tuples in the original relation, we propose here different identification methods based on the possibility of grouping the tuples according to some predefined criteria. The proposed modelling mechanism is general enough to capture in a uniform way also the case where wholes emerge from their components or constituents. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.