Assume that you are building a database for an animal shelter. The shelter accepts strays and places them in foster care until they are adopted.

Foster families are volunteers who are first screened. The database needs to track of all the animals, their species, breed, name and condition. It also needs to track all approved foster families and the animals in their care. Foster families submit monthly reports on the animals in their care. The database also needs to keep track of the adoptions of the animals.

Currently volunteers come into the shelter and fill out a paper form. After a background check, they are added to a file. Some volunteers complain that they are never contacted again. The shelter staff admits that they tend to use foster caregivers that they know, and some people get forgotten in the file. The shelter has also occasionally lost track of an animal in foster care. when the caregiver failed to turn in the monthly report. Another problem is that when someone comes into the shelter looking to adopt, it is not always easy to let them know which animals are available for adoption.

Ideally, the shelter would like people to be able to register as a volunteer online. They would like to be able to call up a list of volunteer foster families. They would also like to be able to pull up all the animals of the kind a potential adopter is interested in and know exactly where those animals are and who is caring for them.

Questions

What are the major issues in this scenario?

Identify the major entities.

For each entity identify the attributes