[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Linkbases, Topic Maps, and RDF Knowledge Bases -- help me
On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Uche Ogbuji wrote: > > I think one common example of ternary relationship is the supplier kind > of > > relationship. It is something like (not very sure of the exact one) > > m suppliers supply n products to p cities. > > > > I think the following is allowed in ODMG: > > > > class supply { > > relationship Supplier supplier; > > relationship Product product; > > relationship City city; > > } > > Either I'm missing something, or you're still mixing up N-ary > relationships with binary relationships of greater than unit cardinality. > > Your ODMG example, for instance, is most certainly not an N-ary > relationship. The relationship is from supply to suppiler, from supply to > product and from supply to city. There is no relationship between, say > city and product or vice versa. > > Once again, ODMG cannot express N-ary relationships. Sorry for the delayed response. I was not very well over the last couple of days. Also I think we can move it to one-on-one conversation regarding this? In the example, supply conceptually represents a relationship. Yes, I think I see your point, you can say that a ternary relationship is represented in ODMG as 3 binary relationships. There is no explicit support for N-ary relationships in ODMG. Therefore ODMG cannot express N-ary relationships. But this is the case because there is no difference between the representation of a relationship and an entity -- it is the same in relational model or ODMG model. But in ER, we have a difference in representation - an entity is a rectangle, and a relationship is a diamond. Am I on the same track as you now? Also one thing which I was wondering was do people use UML for data modeling? I think ER is the tool, UML is just more like a programming model. regards - murali.
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