Conceptual schema

This is a high-level model with insufficient detail to build a complete, functional database.

[citation needed] It hides the internal details of physical storage and targets the description of entities, datatypes, relationships and constraints.

Specifically, it describes the things of significance to an organization (entity classes), about which it is inclined to collect information, and their characteristics (attributes) and the associations between pairs of those things of significance (relationships).

Because a conceptual schema represents the semantics of an organization, and not a database design, it may exist on various levels of abstraction.

The original ANSI four-schema architecture began with the set of external schemata that each represents one person's view of the world around him or her.