involves defining business entities, attributes for each entity, and relationships among entities. The latter are sometimes referred to as cardinality and optionality rules. For example, a grocery store application might include entities for store, employee, customer, item and sales transaction. Each store can have multiple employees, but each employee might only be allowed to be a full-time employee in a single store. Similarly each sales transaction must have a single customer, and can have one or more items sold.
Logical data models (LDMs) are often produced in the form of an Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD), which uses notation for expressing entities as boxes and relationships as lines. Attributes either appear in the boxes or are listed for each entity. Relationships are lines between the boxes, with the cardinality and optionality expressed as a circle for zero (or optional), a vertical line for "one" and a crow's foot for "many".