Abstract
An Entity Relationship (ER) model that includes all the concepts of the original ER model and the additional concepts of generalizations/specializations and categories is often referred to as the Extended ER (EER) model (Elmasri & Navathe, 2007). With the rising complexity of database applications, and also in light of today’s web data applications (Necasky, 2006), the basic concepts of the ER model, as originally developed by Chen(1976), are no longer sufficient. Hence the basic ER model has been extended to include generalizations and specializations (Bagui & Earp, 2003; Elmasri & Navathe, 2007), and the concept of categories (Elmasri, et al., 1985). In this short article we shed some light on these relationship concepts, concepts that database designers often find difficult to directly model (Engels et al., 1992/93). We also discuss the mapping rules for generalizations/specializations and categories. Important contributions in this area are also reported in (Elmasri et al., 1985; Gogolla & Hohenstein, 1991; Markowitz & Shoshani, 1992; Dey, et. al., 1999). Dullea, et. al. (2003) discusses the structural validity of modeling structures with ER models.
TopGeneralization / Specialization Relationships
If we are modeling a hospital database, for example, and we want to store information about the hospital’s nurses, technicians, and physician assistants, we could create separate entities such as NURSE, TECHNICIAN and PHYSICIAN ASSISTANT. But, these three entities would also have a lot of fields in common, for example, name, social security number, address, phone, etc. may be common to all three entities. So, it would be a good idea to have an entity set called EMPLOYEE containing these common fields, and entity subsets, NURSE, TECHNICIAN and PHYSICIAN ASSISTANT, that could inherit this information from the EMPLOYEE entity set. In this case the EMPLOYEE entity set would be called the superclass. This superclass is a generalization of the entity subsets, NURSE, TECHNICIAN and PHYSICIAN ASSISTANT. The NURSE, TECHNICIAN and PHYSICIAN ASSISTANT would be called the subclasses. The subclasses are specializations of the superclass, EMPLOYEE, and inherit from the superclass. Several specializations can be defined for the same entity type (or superclass).
The subclass, denoted by a separate entity rectangle in the EER diagram, is considered to be a part of the superclass entity set, EMPLOYEE. Although it will have attributes that distinguish it from other subclasses, it is considered only a subset of the EMPLOYEE entity set. That is, all nurses are employees, but the reverse is not true - not all employees are nurses. Likewise, all technicians or physician assistants are employees, but all employees are not technicians or physician assistants.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Subclass: Same as specialization; a meaningful sub-grouping of entity-sets that needs to be represented explicitely. These sub-groups are a subset of the entities that belong to the entity set from which they are derived.
Inheritance: A subclass inherits all the attributes of a superclass and all the relationships that it (the superclass) participates in.
Specialization: A process of conceptual refinement to form specialized subclasses for entity sets. An entity type can have several specializations or categories of specializations defined on the basis of some distinguishing characteristics of the entities in the superclass.
Category: A collection of objects or entities that is a subset of the union of different entity types; entities offering a similar role are grouped into a category.
Generalization: When entities have similar basic attributes, they can be classified into a generalized entity type. Generalization is the process of finding commonalities between entities to be able to abstract to a higher level entity set.
Superclass: Same a generalization. A superclass is the main set (entity) from which subsets (sub-classes) are defined based on meaningful criteria needed for a particular database.
Entity sets or entity types: Similar entities or objects with common properties are summarized into entity sets or entity types; graphically represented in rectangles.