Conceptual data modeling patterns: Representation and validation

The tremendous demand for software productivity has led to the idea of reuse of solutions that have worked successfully in the past. The notion of a design pattern is now well accepted in software design, and research in the area of data modeling has also begun. Although two books have explicitly attempted to cover this area, the representations provided in the books seem to be focused on specific applications and do not provide a generic and comprehensive set of templates. Another book attempts to address the problem but provides patterns at a level of granularity too small to be useful. This paper teases out underlying structures that tend to occur frequently in these books and provides patterns at an abstract and more useful level of granularity. It describes 11 data modeling patterns commonly found in business scenarios. The patterns are then validated by checking the frequency of occurrence of each pattern in the data representations included in three comprehensive texts of reference models. Two of these sources are targeted mainly at practitioners, and the third is academic oriented and targeted at students learning data modeling. Results indicate that although certain patterns are used more frequently than others, most of the 11 structures occur with adequate frequency to qualify as patterns. A comparison reveals that the frequency distribution of patterns is different among these sources. Further, the academic-oriented source distinctly focuses on different patterns as compared to the other two sources. The paper discusses the differences and provides specific recommendations on improving pedagogy in conceptual data modeling.