ERDoc: A Web Interface for Entity-Relation Modelling
Authors: 
Matias Lopez, Sebastian Ferrada, and Aidan HoganAuthors Info & Claims
Matias Lopez, Sebastian Ferrada, and Aidan HoganAuthors Info & ClaimsJune 2024
Pages 7 - 12
Abstract
Computer Science professors at the University of Chile have found that their students often lack the abilities required to adequately model a relational database, for example, in the context of capstone Software Engineering projects. These students have passed an introductory Databases course covering conceptual modelling via Entity–Relation (ER) diagrams. A possible cause is that modelling tools found on the Web force students to immediately think in terms of tables and foreign keys instead of in terms of concepts and how they connect. In this paper, we present ERDoc: an application aimed at assisting students and other users through the modelling process. We define a syntax to allow users to describe entities, their attributes and relationships; from these descriptions, we automatically and dynamically generate ER diagrams. Both syntactic and semantic errors are detected and informed to the user. Preliminary evaluations with professors, teaching assistants and students show that ERDoc Playground is usable and useful in the task of conceptual modelling of databases, and thus has the potential to improve the conceptual-modelling aptitudes of Computer Science students.
References
[1]
[n. d.]. DBDiagrams. http://dbdiagram.io. [Online; accessed 26-April-2024].
[2]
[n. d.]. MySQL Workbench. https://dev.mysql.com/doc/workbench/en/. [Online; accessed 26-April-2024].
[3]
[n. d.]. pgModeler. https://pgmodeler.io/. [Online; accessed 26-April-2024].
[4]
John Brooke. 1996. SUS: a “quick and dirty” usability scale. Usability evaluation in industry 189, 3 (1996), 189–194.
[5]
Gonçalo Carvalho, Sergii Mykolyshyn, Bruno Cabral, Jorge Bernardino, and Vasco Pereira. 2022. Comparative Analysis of Data Modeling Design Tools. IEEE Access 10 (2022), 3351–3365. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3139071
[6]
Peter Pin-Shan Chen. 1976. The entity-relationship model—toward a unified view of data. ACM transactions on database systems (TODS) 1, 1 (1976), 9–36.
[7]
Karen C. Davis. 2014. Teaching Conceptual Design Capture. In Advances in Conceptual Modeling. Vol. 8697. Springer International Publishing, Cham, 247–256. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14139-8_26
[8]
Karen C. Davis. 2018. Teaching Physical Database Design. In Advances in Conceptual Modeling. Vol. 11158. Springer International Publishing, Cham, 165–175. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01391-2_22
[9]
Kamal Hingorani, Dexter Gittens, and Nicholas Edwards. 2017. Reinforcing Database Concepts By Using Entity Relationships Diagrams (ERD) and Normalization Together for Designing Robust Databases. Issues in Information Systems 18, 1 (2017), 148–155.
[10]
Jeff Sauro. 2011. Measuring Usability with the System Usability Scale (SUS). https://measuringu.com/sus/
[11]
Natalya Keberle and Ivan V Utkin. 2012. Teaching Conceptual Modeling in ER: Chen Worlds. In ICTERI. 222–227.
[12]
Raghu Ramakrishnan and Johannes. Gehrke. 2003. Database Management Systems. McGraw-Hill Education. https://books.google.cl/books?id=JSVhe-WLGZ0C
[13]
Johannes Schildgen. 2020. MonstER Park-The Entity-Relationship-Diagram Learning Game. In ER Forum/Posters/Demos. 150–157.
[14]
John Miles Smith and Diane C. P. Smith. 1977. Database abstractions: aggregation and generalization. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 2, 2 (jun 1977), 105–133. https://doi.org/10.1145/320544.320546
[15]
Li Yang and Li Cao. 2016. The effect of MySQL Workbench in teaching entity-relationship diagram (ERD) to relational schema mapping. International Journal of Modern Education and Computer Science 8, 7 (2016), 1.
Index Terms
- ERDoc: A Web Interface for Entity-Relation Modelling
Recommendations
Preliminary explorations in specifying and validating entity-relationship models in PVS
AFM '07: Proceedings of the second workshop on Automated formal methodsEntity-Relationship (ER) diagrams are an established way of doing data modeling. In this paper, we report our experience with exploring the use of PVS to formally specify and reason with ER data models. Working with a text-book example, we rely on PVS's ...
Higher-Order Entity Relationship Modelling with UML
QSIC '05: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Quality SoftwareTo explore the use of UML for creating valuerepresentable data models, we use the Object Management Group (OMG) Meta Object Facility (MOF) to formally describe the Higher-order Entity Relationship Model (HERM). In addition, we formally define a UML ...
User Interface Modeling in UMLi
Although user interfaces represent an essential part of software systems, the Unified Modeling Language seems to have been developed with little specific attention given to user interface issues. You can use standard UML to model important aspects of ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
June 2024
44 pages
Copyright © 2024 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
Sponsors
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 02 July 2024
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
- Research
- Refereed limited
Funding Sources
- FONDECYT
- ANID - Millennium Science Initiative Program
Conference
SIGMOD/PODS '24
Sponsor:
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 11Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)11
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)11
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
View options
View or Download as a PDF file.
PDFeReader
View online with eReader.
eReaderHTML Format
View this article in HTML Format.
HTML FormatGet Access
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in