Terminology for composite attributes

The current model has a relation Person with an attribute Phone. Phone currently has a value of a single 10-digit phone number.

If a new requirement comes along to change Phone so that there can be one or more Phone numbers for each Person, we have changed the multiplicity requirement. We could now call Phone a "multivalued attribute" and most software developers and data modelers would understand what is meant by that term.

Now let's say that there is no such change to the multiplicity but there is instead a requirement to add a PhoneType attribute, with values such as "H" for "Home" or "W" for "Work". Let's say that we change the type of the attribute named Phone so that it is the composite of attributes PhoneNumber and PhoneType.

In this case we might say we are changing Phone to a struct, tuple, relation, class, data bean, group, aggregate, composite, or even table, but it is one with only one "row" of values. However, several of these terms might lead one to think of a data structure with both multiple rows and multiple columns and I only want the latter.

Question 1: Is "composite attribute" a good, understandable, phrase for this in a similar way that "multivalued attribute" is for the previous scenario?

Phone is still an attribute with multiplicity of one, even if the __________ is now greater than one. I would fill in that blank with "degree" but that is likely to be misunderstood.

Question 2: Is there a better word to use to fill in that blank?

Thanks. --dawn Received on Mon Mar 21 2005 - 06:19:37 CET