A conceptual model describes the semantics of data elements or business entities and the relationships among them. Specifically, it describes the things of business significance (entity classes) and characteristics of (attributes) and associations between pairs of those things of significance (relationships). Conceptual models are often expressed using data structure diagram (DSD) as well as simple written assertions expressing the relationships among entities. Consider the examples below:
PERSON is a sub-type of PARTY.
The above means that every instance of PERSON is also an instance of PARTY.
Each Employee may have the supervisor within Employee.
