Question

Lake Shore Medical Center wants to keep track of all administrative appointments, including dates of appointment and dates of termination (Hint: Time-variant data is at work). The Medical Center administrator may want to know how many department directors worked in each of the seven departments between January 1, 1965, and December 31, 2021, and who was the IT Director in 2015. Given this information, create the complete ERD that contains all primary keys, foreign keys, and main attributes.

Answer 1

To track administrative appointments at Lake Shore Medical Center, an ERD will include entities for Departments, Directors, and Appointments with attributes like DepartmentID, DirectorID, and dates. This ERD will manage time-variant data and support historical queries.

Step-by-step explanation:

Creating an ERD for Lake Shore Medical Center

To track the administrative appointments at Lake Shore Medical Center, including dates of appointment and termination, an Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD) is essential. This ERD must capture time-variant data to fulfill the administrative needs. Considering the scenario, the ERD should include entities for Departments, Directors, and Appointments, with each entity containing required attributes and identifiers.

For instance, the Departments entity will have attributes such as DepartmentID (primary key) and DepartmentName. The Directors entity should include DirectorID (primary key), DirectorName, and possibly other relevant details like contact information. Most importantly, the Appointments entity will detail the AppointmentID (primary key), DirectorID (foreign key), DepartmentID (foreign key), StartDate, and EndDate. This will help in tracking the employment lifecycle of department directors within the Medical Center.

To answer queries such as the number of department directors who have served in each department between specific dates or the identity of the IT Director in a given year, the ERD must support queries that involve joining data across these entities based on the temporal attributes and foreign key relationships. Proper design of the ERD will enable the administrator to retrieve historical data with accuracy and efficiency.