Common Sense Reasoning in Automated Database Design: An Empirical Test

A great deal of work on automating systems design and development has been carried out, especially in the database area. Systems that semi-automate the database design process have been developed. These systems are interactive in that they may need to ask the user (usually, a database designer) for clarification. The result is that the system asks questions to the user that make the system look less intelligent than it should. This general type of problem has long been recognized with a proposed approach to overcoming it being the incorporation of common sense knowledge into a design system. The View Creation System is an expert system that plays the role of a database designer. With it, a user knowing little about database technology can express his or her database design requirements, which are represented by an entity-relationship model and then translated into a normalized relational model. The system contains a great deal of knowledge about database design, but little, if any, about the user’s application. This forces the user to specify many trivial facts that would be known by any human designer. To overcome this limitation, a Common Sense Business Reasoner is being developed that has a knowledge base containing general knowledge about the world and a reasoning tool to apply this knowledge to a database design task. An empirical study is carried out to simulate and assess the effectiveness of adding the Common Sense Business Reasoner to the View Creation System.