Literacy and data modeling

Abstract

Reading and assimilating information in documents is a necessity of modern life. Literacy was once considered to be just the ability to read and write; but the term has evolved today to mean the ability to understand and employ printed information in daily activities, at home, at work and in the community. As used today, literacy involves many scales including prose, document, and quantitative; literacy testing involves the completion of several tasks designed for each scale. What is of interest to us here is the concept of document literacy and how that fits into the development of an information model. When developing an information system the data analyst designs a conceptual schema using a process such as the Conceptual Schema Development Process. In this paper we focus on non-continuous matrix documents as known for document literacy and their counterparts in Object-Role Modeling's conceptual model. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.