Acknowledgments

We greatly appreciate the editorial assistance of Mary James at Morgan Kaufmann, the suggestions made by the anonymous reviewers, the technical editing by Dr. Andy Carver, and the copy editing by Melissa Revell. We also thank Technologies ‘N Typography for permission to use their TNT fonts.

Some of this book’s content is based on articles written for The Business Rules Journal, the Journal of Conceptual Modeling, and material from editions of the earlier book Conceptual Schema and Relational Database Design, previously published by Prentice Hall Australia and WyfLytPub. The first edition of that book was coauthored by Dr. Sjir Nijssen, who wrote the final four chapters (since replaced).

The ORM approach discussed in this book is based on our revisions and extensions to the NIAM method, which was largely developed in its original form by Dr. Eckhard Falkenberg, Dr. Sjir Nijssen, and Prof. Robert Meersman, with other contributions from several researchers. Some of the work discussed in this book was developed jointly with current or former colleagues, including Dr. Anthony Bloesch, Dr. Linda Bird, Dr. Peter Ritson, Dr. Erik Proper, Dr. Andy Carver, and Dr. Herman Balsters. It has been a pleasure working with these colleagues, as well as with the hundreds of students and practitioners with whom trial versions of the material in this book were tested. We also gratefully acknowledge permission by The University of Queensland and Neumont University to include a small selection of our past assessment questions within the exercises.

A modeling method as good as ORM deserves a good CASE tool. Over the last decade, talented staff at ServerWare, Asymetrix Corporation, InfoModelers Incorporated, Visio Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, and Neumont University have worked to develop state of the art CASE tools to support the specific ORM method discussed in this book. The following talented individuals currently working as lead software engineers on the NORMA tool deserve special mention: Matt Curland and Kevin Owen.

Finally we thank our wives, Norma and Gwen, for being so understanding and supportive while we were busily occupied in the writing task.