The Data Model Resource Book, Volume 3: Universal Patterns for Data Modeling

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304 Chapter 7 ■ Contact Mechanisms: How to Get in Touch

contacted? We may want to also know the contact mechanisms for other

types of entities, such as facilities, orders, shipments, and so on.

What information is available about each contact mechanism, for

example, what is the purpose and usage of each of the different con-

tact mechanisms? You may want to know the phone number that should

be used for billing inquiries, the postal address that should be used for

returns, or the email address that is specified as the ‘work’ email address.

We believe that there is a great advantage in maintaining all of the different

types of contact information (postal addresses, telephone numbers, email

addresses, and so on) in a consistent way throughout your enterprise, and

the patterns in this chapter can help a great deal toward this. From our

experiences working with many enterprises, we have found that contact

mechanism information represents a very large percentage of the fields that

are maintained in various legacy systems. We have also found that this type of

data is maintained in a wide variety of inconsistent formats between databases.

If there were a more standard and consistent way of modeling this type of data,

we believe that this would result in much easier database maintenance and

much better data quality and would provide much easier access to