Abstract
Relational database systems are currently the most dominant in both centralised and distributed database environments inspite of the many limitations of these systems. A fundamental weakness of these systems is that the logical structure of the data of their DBs which must be exploited by their users is usually buried in the DB schemas, application programs and in the minds of designers and programmers. The vast number of casual and inexperienced users currently employing these DBs for their day to day applications makes it imperative for their logical structure to be made explicit and readily available in some easily assimilated form.
A number of algorithms have been proposed for this reverse modelling activity which essentially generate a conceptual model from a given relational DB schema. In this paper we make a comparative study of three representative previous algorithms and then present a new improved and more general algorithm based on these previous attempts.
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Fonkam, M.M., Gray, W.A. (1992). An approach to eliciting the semantics of relational databases. In: Loucopoulos, P. (eds) Advanced Information Systems Engineering. CAiSE 1992. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 593. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0035148
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0035148
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