Relationship Design Using Spreadsheet Reasoning for Sets of Functional Dependencies

Entity-Relationship and other common database modeling tools have restricted capabilities for designing a relationship of higher arity. Although a complete and unambiguous specification can be achieved by traditional functional dependencies for relational schemata, use of the traditional formal notation in practice is rare. We propose an alternative way: designing or surveying the properties of a non-binary relationship among object classes or attributes is considered by spreadsheet reasoning methods for functional dependencies. Another representation by the semilattice of closed attribute sets can also be used in parallel due to convenient conversion facilities.