10-04-2017, 07:58 PM
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.