  The problems that scientists face in creating well designed databases
intersect with the concerns of data curation. Entity-relationship modeling and
its variants have been the basis of most relational data modeling for decades.
However, these abstractions and the relational model itself are intricate and
have proved not to be very accessible among scientists with limited resources
for data management. This paper explores one aspect of relational data models,
the meaning of foreign key relationships. We observe that a foreign key
produces a table relationship that generally references either an entity or
repeating attributes. This paper proposes constructing foreign keys based on
these two cases, and suggests that the method promotes intuitive data modeling
and normalization.
