How practitioners perceive a ternary relationship in ER conceptual modeling

Conceptual modeling is well suited as a subject that constitutes the "core" of the Information Systems (IS) discipline and has grown in response to IS development. Several modeling grammars and methods have been studied extensively in the IS discipline. Previous studies, however, present deficiencies in research methods and even put forward contradictory results about the ternary relationship in conceptual modeling. For instance, some studies contend that the semantics of a binary relationship are better for novices, but others argue that a ternary relationship is better than three binary relationships when the association among three entity types clearly exists. The objective of this research is to acquire complete and accurate understanding of the ternary relationship, specifically to understand practitioners' modeling performance when utilizing either a ternary or binary relationship. To the best of our knowledge, no previous work clearly compares real-world modeler performance differences between binary and ternary representations. By investigating practitioners' understanding of ternary relationship and identifying practitioners' cognition, this research can broaden the perspective on conceptual modeling.