Comparing Representations wit Relational and EER Models h

End-user development of information systems represents a major departure from the development of systems by trained and experienced specialists [2, 28, 341. This trend raises numerous questions concerning the efficacy and hidden cost of such systems which may be poorly designed because of the users’ lack of expertise. Major tools used by users to develop their systems are database management systems (DBMSs) and fourth generation languages with DBMS capabilities. Clearly the most popular DBMS for user application development is any of a variety of systems based on the relational data model [3]. The relational model is characterized by desirable properties like data independence and ability to support high-level query languages [26]. Another trend likely to affect the use of database management systems is the proliferation of data models. The more recent data models are generally termed semantic data models [31]. The diffusion of information technology to end users coupled with the propositions of semantic data models raises the human factor issue of usability of these models. This article describes such a usability study which compares representations developed by end users using two popular data models-the relational, which is a classical data model, and the extended entity relationship (EER) model, which is a semantic data model.

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