Using this breakdown, sketch a simple Fact Model that illustrates the entities and their relationships, or associations. In the Fact Model, entities are rectangular boxes, associations between entities are straight lines connecting the entity boxes, and entity-to-attribute relationships are diagonal lines from the associated entity. The following illustration is the resulting Fact Model:

A unified modeling language (UML) class diagram contains the same type of information, and may be more familiar to you:

It is not a requirement to construct diagrams or models of the Vocabulary before building it in Corticon. But, it can be very helpful in organizing and conceptualizing the structures and relationships, especially for very large and complex Vocabularies. The BRMS Fact Model and UML Class Diagram are appropriate because they remain sufficiently abstracted from lower-level data models that contain information not typically required in a Vocabulary.