Accommodating mesodata into conceptual modelling methodologies

Mesodata modelling is a recently developed approach for enhancing a data model’s capabilities by providing for more advanced semantics to be associated with the domain of an attribute. Mesodata supplies both an inter-value structure to the domain and a set of operations applicable to that structure that may be used to facilitate additional functionality in a database. We argue that conceptual modelling methodologies would be semantically richer if they were able to express the semantics of complex data types for attribute domains. This paper investigates the accommodation of mesodata into the entity-relationship and object role modelling, presenting the Mesodata Entity-Relationship (MDER) model and Mesodata Object Role Modelling (MDORM), which show how the mesodata concept can be incorporated into conceptual modelling methodologies to include the semantics of complex-domain structures.