Objectives

  • To develop a conceptual data model diagram
  • To perform logical design (optional)

Assignment Specification

In this assignment, you need to perform the following tasks for the given case study:

  • Draw an Entity Relationship (ER) diagram
  • Perform logical design (optional)
  • Create 3NF Relations (optional)

Case Study

CQ Insurance (CQI) offers insurance policies to insure Home-buildings and Home-Contents of Australian residents. For each of their properties (Homes) of interest, the customers can apply for either a Home-buildings policy or a Home-contents policy or a combined Home-buildings-contents policy. CQI allows a customer to have only one of the above mentioned policies for each of his/her properties.

When new customers approach for an insurance policy (hereafter called as policy), CQI collects their details so that they can communicate with them in future. Each policy requires full premium payment prior to the coverage period of one year. At the time of preparing the policies, CQI collects the details of the property (Home) and/or items (Home contents) depending upon the type of the policy that the customer is interested in.

At the time when a customer lodges an insurance claim (hereafter called as claim) such as collapse of false ceiling, loss of home contents, etc., CQI ensures that the insurance policy has not lapsed prior to processing the claims and further verifies that the items claimed have been covered by the respective policy. A claim should be related to only one policy but each claim is not limited to only one item that has been covered by the policy. As part of the claim-processing for each of the claims, an assessor (appointed by CQI) prepares and submits an initial assessment and if required the assessor also prepares and submits a final assessment. The assessor's initial assessment may recommend either to further process or reject the related claim. The assessors final assessment will provide the total amount that can be settled relating to the claim and may contain a memo that describes the recommended settlement amount for each of the items that have been claimed.

Note:

The attributes of the possible entities have not been mentioned clearly. Hence, you need to assume at least two and at most nine relevant attributes for each of the entities that you will identify for your ER diagram.

In addition to the recommendations in the assessor's report, the following processes can also provide the reasons for rejection of the claim:

  • Verification to ascertain whether the claimed items have been covered by the respective policy or not
  • Ensuring that the policy is in force (has not lapsed) at the time of lodging the claim

Assignment Requirements

In this assignment, you need to create an Entity Relationship (ER) diagram relevant to the above case study and optionally perform logical design to produce appropriate 3NF Relations.

The attributes for various entities have not been purposely described in the case study so that the students are encouraged to further research and list the pertinent attributes in addition to the required identifier for each and every entity in their ERD.

1 Draw an appropriate ER diagram

Use the symbols as prescribed in your unit-textbook to draw the ER diagram (ERD) for the above case study.

Your ERD must

  • show all necessary entities, attributes and relationships
  • show identifiers/identifying attributes as necessary
  • show multi-valued attributes, if any
  • show participation and cardinality
  • show associative entities, if appropriate
  • show weak entities, if any
  • use the notation described in the set text
  • use consistent and appropriate naming for entities and attributes as specified in the unit text book

Some business rules or other aspects of the case study may not be clear to you when you read the case study. If this is the case, then you should either approach your lecturer or tutor for clarification, or you may simply make an assumption and then develop your ERD accordingly. For example, the case study might not mention all relevant participation information (also called minimum cardinalities). If so, you may make an assumption about what the minimum cardinalities might reasonably be, and then show them in your ERD accordingly. You should justify each assumption in terms of the business, for example: it is assumed that each customer must have at least one policy because it is assumed that the business does not record customer details until the customer opts for a policy with them.

To get yourself started, ask yourself, 'If I were running this business, what things I need to keep a list of?' Write those things down. For each thing, what information would you need to record about it? How can it be identified? The answers to these questions will help you to develop your ERD.

2 Assumptions and Business rules

Provide assumptions and business rules relevant to your ERD.

3 Create Logical Design (Optional):

If you would like to perform this optional component of this assignment, you can map your Entity Relationship diagram (ERD) into relations and make sure that all the relations are in 3NF. Provide all the relations in the following format:

Customer (CustomerId, customerName, Street, Suburb, State, PostCode, Email)
Invoice (InvoiceNumber, invoiceDate, Total, CustomerId)
foreign key (CustomerId) references Customer(CustomerId)
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