The Entity-Relationship Model - Toward a Unified View of Data

Chen, P. P. (1976). The Entity-Relationship Model - Toward a Unified View of Data. ACM, 1(1), 9-36.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1976

Volume

1

Issue

1

Pages

9-36

DOI

10.1145/320434.320440

DOI registrant

Association for Computing Machinery

Link

https://doi.org/10.1145/320434.320440

Cited by

6 citations across 6 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Domain-specific

• Data Model
  • Chen's entity–relationship model made entities, relationships, and attributes explicit for conceptual design.
• Entity–relationship model
  • An ER model organizes persistent domain semantics before they are translated into relational tables or another implementation schema.
• One-to-many (data model)
  • A one-to-many relationship has maximum cardinality one on one role and many on the other: one instance of A may be associated with multiple B instances, while each B is associated with at most one A in that relationship.

Mechanisms

• Conceptual Model
  • Its characteristic failure is biased essentialization: the loudest stakeholder's ontology quietly becomes "the" model, and every dissenting way of carving up the domain gets coded as noise — a real risk because the artifact looks authoritative and, once drawn, tends to freeze.

    This sourceIt is the canonical conceptual-model notation, and its long life is a reminder that such a model's authority comes from consensus among people who know the domain, not from the diagram itself.

• Entity-Relationship Schema
  • This is the entity-relationship model doing its original job.

    This sourceIntroduces the entity–relationship model as a semantic and diagrammatic way to describe real-world entities and their relationships for database design.

• Schema Draft
  • … keep the "draft" and the open-question markers loud, to date and re-issue versions, and to leave the schema formally provisional until it has survived review — the opposite of the informal, free-text Concept Map, which stays deliberately un-typed because its job is to generate rather than to specify.

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