08-16-2017, 10:34 PM
An entity relationship model (ER model) describes inter-related things of interest in a specific domain of knowledge. An ER model is composed of entity types (which classify the things of interest) and specifies relationships that can exist between instances of those entity types.
An entity relationship diagram for an MMORPG using Chen's notation.
In software engineering an ER model is commonly formed to represent things that a business needs to remember in order to perform business processes. Consequently, the ER model becomes an abstract data model that defines a data or information structure that can be implemented in a database, typically a relational database.
Entity relationship modeling was developed for database design by Peter Chen and published in a 1976 paper. However, variants of the idea existed previously,some ER modelers show super and subtype entities connected by generalization-specialization relationships, and an ER model can be used also in the specification of domain-specific ontology.
