Editor's Corner
by Patrick Hallock

There are some questions about which version of MS Visio supports the ORM solution which are addressed. There is information on Service Release 1 for Visio that does not include the VSEA version. We made more object role modeling presentations this month. There are some other interesting tools that we have looked at for mind mapping - this stencil is also available in Visio.

Microsoft’s new database modeling tool: Part 5
Terry Halpin
Microsoft Corporation

 Abstract: This is the fifth in a series of articles introducing the Visio-based database modeling component of Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Enterprise Architect. Part 1 discussed how to create a basic ORM source model, map it to a logical database model, and generate a DDL script for the physical database schema. Part 2 discussed how to use the verbalizer, mark an object type as independent, objectify an association, and add some other ORM constraints to an ORM source model. Part 3 showed how to add set-comparison constraints (subset, equality and exclusion) and how exclusive-or constraints are obtained by combining exclusion and disjunctive mandatory constraints. Part 4 discussed how to add basic subtyping details to an ORM model and map them to a database schema. Part 5 discusses mapping subtypes to separate tables, and occurrence frequency constraints.

Applying Dimensional Analysis to Business Intelligence Systems
by Amit Bhagwat

 Most of us study bits of elementary Physics as we get through our schooling. A few of us find it fascinating, a few others reckon it too idealistic with bodies continuing to move forever purely by divine miracle. Many more find it awfully boring with so many laws to remember and equations to derive. Indeed, very few of us have anything at all to do with much of Physics as realistic science. Yet there are too many principles and practices initiated in Physics that have value in virtually every sphere of our life, and Information Industry is by far among the greatest beneficiaries of Physics. 

 State Flow Technique for Business Processes Analysis
Case Studies
by Tomas Andersson, Annika Andersson Ceder, Ilia Bider

The exponential growth of the Internet and information technology in general leads to the increased volumes of customer requests and often brings about the situation when a small staff has to cope with a large number of business processes. To achieve an effective management under the circumstances one needs a computer system able to support these business processes. Such a system cannot be developed without first modeling business processes. To model business processes relevant for a particular domain analysts need to acquire a great deal of "in-house" information from the people who participate in business processes – the information on routines, rules, etc. In general, it is not enough to get the process participants to describe their actions, they should first achieve a deeper understanding of the processes in which they participate (in terms of goals, activities, etc). A special technique called State Flow (SF) has been developed to give the process participants the idea of in which processes they participate. The paper gives an overview of application of the SF technique to building models of two business processes: a decision-making process and a process of recruiting new members (for a nonprofit association). 

Reifying Model Integration Abilities from Natural Language
by Alexandra Galatescu

The paper is a study on natural language (NL) from the viewpoint of the conceptual model integration. The universality, unifying abilities, natural extensibility, logic and reusability of NL, as well as its morphological and syntactic stability, made the modelers think of transposing these features to object and process modeling. A correspondence is established here between the main concepts and relationships in NL and the basic concepts and relationships which the designers use in different models like: object, process, dataflow and workflow models. Two main directions are proposed for the study on the integration abilities of NL: (1) the morphological and syntactic categories and (2) the semantic and intersentential relations between objects and actions. These categories and relations are supposed to support the seamless integration of the models, as the background either of a meta-model with linguistic features or of a unifying translation algorithm from NL to several conceptual models.

This is a first in a series of articles that will present a quote each from some industry source (article, exchange, product claim, etc.) that indicates a fundamental fallacy/misconception in data management. The quote is presented for your debunking. The best debunkings setting the record straight, receives... well you just have to go and see.

Dr. John Sharp
January 2002 Soluion
March Analysis Problem
Validating Information Models

The JCM email group has spent a considerable amount of effort in trying to understand the differences among a number of modeling approaches.  The old dogs in these discussions are all experts in NIAM modeling¹.  The big discussions in the early days of NIAM were between NIAM and ER models.  There was no contest for leadership in modeling direction; ER had support in the United States from government, university and industry.  Apparently widespread use of ER was not sufficient for control of future analysis direction because OO came along and has made significant inroads in the area of data modeling.  The argument of whether the model should be NIAM, ER, OO, ORM, LDS or any other modeling methodology continues.  All of these methodologies define a way for presenting the results of analysis.  None of these methodologies have a procedure for doing analysis.

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