
Chapter 11 Semantics and Business Metadata
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Each Person Name must be associated with one and only one Person.
Each Person must be known as one or more Person Names.
These sentences are in fact business metadata that can communicate clearly
to businesspeople, even those that don’t have an affinity for diagrams.
Other ER model “flavors” do not express as much semantics as the Barker
Notation, and therefore most practitioners of data modeling do not address the
semantics of the relationships effectively. Consequently, the usefulness of an
ER diagram to communicate to nontechnical businesspeople has been hotly
debated. Noted author and data modeler ...