REPRESENTATION OF INTEGRITY CONSTRAINTS IN CONCEPTUAL MODELS

Abstract

Integrity constraints are incident part of conceptual models, including part of semantics of problem do-main. Analysis of the most important methods of conceptual modelling has revealed that none of them analyze the complete set of integrity constraints needed for making semantically meaningful model. In our previous work the taxo-nomy of integrity constraints relevant for design of well-formed conceptual models was established. The goal of this paper is to extend capabilities of UML for required types of integrity constraints introducing stereotypes or reusing them from other methods. In contrast with current practice of deferring description of constraints to detailed design, modelling of constraints in the phase of conceptual analysis makes them reusable in various activities: not only in generating DB schema, but also in early verification, validation, transformation to other types of schemas and program code.