Entity Relationship Model

Schedule
INLS 582_001, Fall 2012

Assigned Thursday 3/20/13, due Thursday 4/5/13. 10% of grade.

Design an entity relationship model for the database described below. Your ER should use informative names for the entities and attributes, and should include the primary key, and cardinality and participation notation for each relationship. If you make any assumptions in addition to those given in the description, please include them.

Grading: As usual, I will be looking at accuracy, completeness, and clarity. You may wish to consult the Guidelines for Assignments Containing Models. Please be sure you follow the submission guidelines when you submit your assignment on the course Sakai site.


Professor Q runs a fairly large and productive research lab. Lab members include graduate student assistants, faculty, and staff. They all travel frequently to conferences to present papers and participate in other professional activities. Professor Q. knows that the SILS Assistant Dean for Administration and the Contracts & Grants Specialist keep track of the travel she has funded from her lab budget and grants, and also that they can look up travel records in the University travel system. But she would like to keep her own records so she can look up travel information without bothering them. She doesn't need to record all the details that are captured in the Travel Request and Travel Expense Reimbursement Forms, just some basic information that will remind her who has been where and how much it cost.

She would like to be able to answer questions such as the following.

Most of the information in the database will come from the Leave and Travel Request and Travel Expense Reimbursement Forms. The database should record information about each lab member, including name, PID, and position (staff, faculty, GRA). Information about each conference should include its title, the year, and the city, state, and country in which it was held. A conference (e.g., The Big Conference in 2012) may be attended by many lab members. A lab member may attend many conferences. The DB should include attendance information for each conference a lab member attends, including the start and return dates of the travel, the purpose(s) for attending the conference (drawn from the checkboxes on the Request form), and the total amounts spent for each type of expense: hotel, airfare, ground transportation, meals, and other expenses.

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