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

Silverston c07.tex V2 - 11/20/2008 5:44pm Page 396

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

NOTE

You could expand this pattern to also record the rules about the

allowable ways that POSTAL ADDRESS PART(s) and GEOGRAPHIC BOUNDARY(s)

are related to each other within a COUNTRY. This would provide a data model that

could be used to validate that addresses have a valid structure. For instance, in the

United States of America, the postal address always uses cities that are within

states that are within countries. You could use the rule patterns that are discussed

in Chapter 8 to add a data model structure (with a POSTAL ADDRESS RULE entity

that has relationships to GEOGRAPHIC BOUNDARY TYPE(s) and POSTAL ADDRESS

PART TYPE(s)) to accommodate this or use the Level 3 Recursive Pattern with Rules

described in Chapter 4.

To illustrate this pattern take a look at Table 7-19. If you look at the p ostal

address with the contact mechanism id of ‘‘901’’ (the first seven rows of the

illustration table), you can see that it is made of many different POSTAL

ADDRESS PART(s): ‘‘91001’’ (‘‘100 Main Street’’), ‘‘91002’’ (‘‘Suite 819’’),

‘‘91003’’ (‘‘The Coalman Building’’), and a number of other parts that are

related to various geographic boundaries. In Table 7-19, you see that the

postal address part of ‘‘91001’’ is ‘‘100 Main Street’’ of type ‘‘Street address’’

meaning it is a number (and/or text, such ...