How it works

The data model defines the types of information in your application, such as patient records and physician profiles, and their relationships to one another. For example, your data model might represent the data used by your application to retrieve patient data from a database, pass the home address and medical codes to a service that returns a list of physicians, and then format the results so that case workers process service names and descriptions instead of numeric medical codes.

The following figure illustrates the relationships among components in a data model for a sample billing application.

Data models for physicians and patients

Key terms and concepts

To model data, you need the following components:

Data objects

Categories of data that have fields, field mappings, and connections to data sources.

Fields

Properties that store and format the data in your application.

Data sources

Resources, which can be real or simulated, that host the data.

Field mappings

Logic that links or transforms the fields in a data source to the fields in your application.