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

Review

This paper is one of the most cited in the database literature (at the time this review is written, it is number two in a ranking in the DBLP bibliography), and the reason is that it is a landmark for the database conceptual design area. It is probably the case that some of the concepts presented in the paper already existed in the literature, but here we get a clear presentation of:

1. A simple model, at the same time precise and understandable.
2. An intuitive graphical representation for its constructs (and schemes).
3. A discussion of the way the conceptual schemes can be effectively translated in logical schemes. Now we are mainly interested in the relational model, but when the paper was written, this was not the case; indeed, the E-R model was presented as a basis for unified (or semantic, or conceptual) view of data.

There are large portions of the paper that include discussions and presentations that are still up-to-date, and that one could use in courses nowadays - a thing that is really uncommon in papers in the scientific literature. Clearly, this material is now available in many textbooks, both general database textbooks and database design ones, and therefore there is no need to resort to the paper anymore, but this is a great merit of the paper.

Copyright © 2000 by the author(s). Review published with permission.

References

[1]

Peter P. Chen: The Entity-Relationship Model - Toward a Unified View of Data. ACM Trans. Database Syst. 1(1): 9-36(1976) BibTeX