An Analysis of Cardinality Constraints in Redundant Relationships

In this paper, we present a complete analysis of redundant relationships in the entity-relationship model. Existing approaches use the concept of functional dependencies for identifying redundancy but ignore minimum cardinality constraints that carry important information about the structure of the model. Research literature on the topic is rare and usually is confined to the ‘Many to One’-‘mandatory participation’case. Our approach differs from previous works in that we consider both maximum and minimum cardinality constraints to analyze the 4096 cases required to perform a complete study. Our approach first looks at the maximum cardinality constraints to develop a set of general rules to identify groups of trivial and ambiguous structures, and then we give greater consideration to the minimum cardinality constraints in those groups that require detailed investigation. With this approach we have provided a thorough pattern analysis of redundant relationships from both a struc...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: CIKM
• Authors: James Dullea, Il-Yeol Song
• Keywords: CIKM 1997, Ignore Minimum Cardinality, Information Management, Minimum Cardinality Constraints, Redundant Relationships