Question on Multiplicity



Imagine you were knocking up a simple table of animals and their
predominant colors. Something of the order:

----------------------
animal | color
----------------------
swan | white
lion | yellow
oranguatan | orange
----------------------

Consider also that some animals that have multicolored fur. For
instance a zebra is black and white. Keeping the table nice and
normalized yields:

----------------------
animal | color
----------------------
swan | white
lion | yellow
oranguatan | orange
zebra | black
zebra | white
----------------------

Now you find out that while most swans are white, there are some swans,
although a minority, that are completely black. You can't encode that
into table without introducing a new column to identify an individual
instance of an animal, or you will not be able to distinguish between
an entry which is multi-colored (the zebras) and an entry which is
either completely one color or the other (the swans).

Now my question is am I missing anything - is there any method of
making this distinction without having to introduce a new reference
column to resolve the ambiguity?

Many thanks, Jason.

.



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