can a conceptual model have this?

Question

I was told by a student that a conceptual model includes major entities and their relationships but not such high detail level of information about the attributes and their values.

Is this true?

Is this the limitation to the conceptual model?

Answer 1

The answer depends on whose methodology you prefer. If you are creating a conceptual data model, you will most often model as you say. If you are creating a conceptual business ontology, there is some controversy among experts. I am among the camp that models only concepts in a conceptual business ontology. That is a model of things in the world, not data about things in the world. The former is used to understand a domain; the latter is used to design a particular system. Non-identifiable concepts may be flattened into attributes for the design of a particular system. For example, weight may be modeled more conceptually as "Mass", or with much more commitment to some unit of measure, such as "Pounds on Earth" or "Grams on Mars" in an attribute having a computer serialization of floating point, integer, or string.