This article presents a survey of model-driven techniquesfor data model synthesis. During an extensive research,we identified more than 70 research papers in the field andmore than 15 different graphical notations used for the sourcemodel representation.We have classified the proposed approachesinto four distinct groups: function-oriented, process-oriented,communication-oriented and goal-oriented. Their contributionsare presented in chronological order and evaluated based onseveral main criteria. Although the idea of model-driven designof the data model is more than 25 years old, the survey showsthe richness and diversity of ideas, but only a small number ofimplemented automatic generators.

This paper presents an approach to the automated design of the initial conceptual database model. The UML activity diagram, as a frequently used business process modeling notation, is used as the starting point for the automated generation of the UML class diagram representing the conceptual database model. Formal rules for automated generation cover the automatic extraction of business objects and business process participants, as well as the automatic generation of corresponding classes and their associations. Based on these rules we have implemented an automatic generator and evaluated it on a real business model.