Constructing a Data Schema from an Information Flow Model

摘要

The 'information content' of a data schema is concerned with the capacity of a database in representing the information that the database is designed to provide. It is recognized to be 'difficult to define and measure'. Our literature survey seems to show that this is an unsolved problem and the difficulties seem to lie with the lack of separation of information and data, and particularly with intuitive treatment of information. We examine what is required for solving this problem. We propose an approach to information and information flow for conceptual data modeling by drawing on a set of contemporary theories concerning the semantic aspect of information. With this approach, we formulate an information flow model from human purposeful activities from which to construct a data schema. This way it can be sure that the data schema represents required information, and therefore the latter is definitely in the 'information content' of the former. We observe that this constitutes a possible solution to this problem, and it also represents a 'semantic information theoretic' approach to conceptual data modeling. This work is a result of a substantial study of this problem including several real world case studies.