Question

6)         i)          How would you identify entity and relationship types from a user’s requirements

specification?

            ii)         How would you identify attributes from a user’s requirements specification and

then associate the attributes with entity or relationship types?

Answer 1

a.one method to identifying entities is to examine the users’ requirements specification, from this specification we  identify nouns or noun phrases that are mentioned ex. staff member ,staff name, property number etc),

we also look for the major objects such as people,places,or concepts of intersest, excluding those nouns that are qualities of other objects

After idnetifying the entities the next step is to identify all th erelationship that exist between these entities. when we identify entities, one method is to look for nouns in the user's requirement specification.

b. we will look for noun or noun phrases in the user's requiremnrt specification. The attributes can be identified where the noun or noun phrases ia s property,quality,identifier, of one of the entities.

however in some cases we may want to ask the users to clarify the requirement and they may give answers to this question that also conatin other concepts, so that user's response must be carefully observed.

As there are generally many more attributes than entities and relationship, it may be useful to first produce a list of all attributes given in the user's requirement specification. As an attributr is associated with a particular entity, remove t he attribute from the list . In this way , we ensure thta an attribute is associated with only one entity and when the list is empty all the attribute are associated with some entity .