A Structured Approach To Teaching Cardinalities In The AIS Class

Abstract

Cardinalities specify business rules as part of a conceptual schema. This paper presents a structured approach to teaching cardinalities in the accounting information systems (AIS) class.   First, cardinalities are explained – why they are important, what they are and what notations exist to define them. Next, a three-step approach to teaching cardinalities is presented: syntactic, semantic and heuristic.  Visual and syntactic representations help students understand the cardinality concept and cardinality notation.  During the semantic phase, students learn to define business rules in terms of cardinalities.  Heuristics help students recognize domain-specific stereotypical cardinality patterns.  Such a generalization requires the existence of a semantic framework, and the REA model is used to define cardinality heuristics for enterprise systems. Finally, inter-relationship constraints, which represent participation dependencies across two or more relationships, are discussed.