Metrics for Evaluating the Quality of Entity Relationship Models

This paper defines a comprehensive set of metrics for evaluating the quality of Entity Relationship models. This is an extension of previous research which developed a conceptual framework and identified stakeholders and quality factors for evaluating data models. However quality factors are not enough to ensure quality in practice, because different people will have different interpretations of the same concept. The objective of this paper is to refine these quality factors into quantitative measures to reduce subjectivity and bias in the evaluation process. A total of twenty five candidate metrics are proposed in this paper, each of which measures one of the quality factors previously defined. The metrics may be used to evaluate the quality of data models, choose between alternatives and identify areas for improvement.

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