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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-22T19:00:58+00:00

assuming that you have the following sentence in a requirements document The system has

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assuming that you have the following sentence in a requirements document

The system has to keep track of the names of publishers, their
addresses and telephone numbers

does that mean each publisher can have multiple addresses and multiple phone numbers ?.

again something like that

Information about the books’ names and author(s) is maintained in the database.

does that mean each book can have multiple authors ?

assuming this is not a real system ( can’t get clarification from real clients ) what is the default decision i should take ?

this might not be very programming related , i was going to post this in English stackexchange site but i thought this is the right place since i am more concerned about the database design

thanks in advance

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    English language is often ambiguous, so you can’t be 100% sure what is meant in the first case; you’d have to use your common sense to come up with a solution. However I do think that the use of “author(s)” rather than “authors” in the second case does make it clear that a book may have more than one author – it can be read as shorthand for “author or authors”.

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