Constraint acquisition for Entity-Relationship models

We establish search algorithms from the area of propositional logic as invaluable tools for the semantic knowledge acquisition in the conceptual database design phase. The acquisition of such domain knowledge is crucial for the quality of the target database.Integrity constraints are conditions that capture the semantics of the application domain under consideration. They restrict the databases to those that are considered meaningful to the application at hand. In practice, the decision of specifying a constraint is very important and extremely challenging.We show how techniques from propositional logic can be utilised to offer decision support for specifying Boolean and multivalued dependencies between properties of entities and relationships in conceptual databases. In particular, we use a search version of SAT-solvers to semi-automatically generate sample databases for this class of dependencies in Entity-Relationship models. The sample databases enable design participants to judge, justify, convey and test their understanding of the semantics of the future database. Indeed, the decision by the participants to specify a dependency explicitly is reduced to their decision whether there is some sample database that they can accept as a future database instance.