Virtual Campus (VC) is a social media firm that specializes in creating virtual meeting places for students,
faculty, staff, and others associated with different college campuses. VC was started as a student project in
a database class at Cyber University, an online polytechnic college, with headquarters in a research park in
Dayton, Ohio. The following parts of this exercise relate to different phases in the development of the database VC now provides to client institutions to support
a threaded discussion application. Your assignment is
to draw an ERD to represent each phase of the development of the VC database and to answer questions that
clients raised about the capabilities (business rules) of
the database in each phase. The description of each phase
will state specific requirements as seen by clients, but
other requirements may be implied or possibly should be
implemented in the design slightly differently than the
clients might see them, so be careful to not limit yourself
to only the specifics provided.
a. The first phase was fairly simplistic. Draw an ERD to
represent this initial phase, described by the following:
• A client may maintain several social media sites
(e.g., for intercollegiate sports, academics, local food
and beverage outlets, or a specific student organization). Each site has attributes of Site Identifier, Site
Name, Site Purpose, Site Administrator, and Site
Creation Date.
• Any person may become a participant in any public
site. Persons need to register with the client’s social
media presence to participate in any site, and when
they do the person is assigned a Person Identifier;
the person provides his or her Nickname and Status
(e.g., student, faculty, staff, or friend, or possibly
several such values); the Date Joined the site is automatically generated. A person may also include other
information, which is available to other persons on
the site; this information includes Name, Twitter
Handle, Facebook Page link, and SMS Contact
Number. Anyone may register (no official association
with the client is necessary).
• An account is created each time a person registers to
use a particular site. An account is described by an
Account ID, User Name, Password, Date Created,
Date Terminated, and Date/Time the person most
recently used that account.
• Using an account, a person creates a posting, or
message, for others to read. A posting has a Posting
Date/Time and Content. The person posting the
message may also add a Date when the posting
should be made invisible to other users.
• A person is permitted to have multiple accounts,
each of which is for only one site.