The entity-relationship model—toward a unified view of data

  • Authors:

  • Peter Pin-Shan Chen

  • Affiliations:

  • Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) - Special issue: papers from the international conference on very large data bases: September 22–24, 1975, Framingham, MA
  • Year:
  • 1976

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Abstract

A data model, called the entity-relationship model, is proposed. This model incorporates some of the important semantic information about the real world. A special diagrammatic technique is introduced as a tool for database design. An example of database design and description using the model and the diagrammatic technique is given. Some implications for data integrity, information retrieval, and data manipulation are discussed.The entity-relationship model can be used as a basis for unification of different views of data: the network model, the relational model, and the entity set model. Semantic ambiguities in these models are analyzed. Possible ways to derive their views of data from the entity-relationship model are presented.