Survey of cardinality constraints in snapshot and temporal semantic data models

Cardinality captures necessary semantics in conceptual data modeling and determines how constructs are translated into relations. Business policies in a variety of domains like healthcare, education, supply chain management and geographic systems are often expressible in terms of cardinality. The knowledge about cardinality constraints is also useful during schema integration, in query transformation for more efficient search strategies, and in database testing. Practically every conceptual modeling grammar provides support for this kind of constraint, and in an effort to resolve the variations in semantics past research has studied the different types of cardinality constraints. None have been so far comprehensive, and further there has been very little coverage of the concept in temporal domain even though it provides some interesting extensions to the concept. This study considers existing work in snapshot and temporal cardinality and suggests some areas for future work.