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Concept
Entity–relationship model
Summary
An entity–relationship model (or ER model) describes interrelated things of interest in a specific domain of knowledge. A basic ER model is composed of entity types (which classify the things of interest) and specifies relationships that can exist between entities (instances of those entity types).
In software engineering, an ER model is commonly formed to represent things 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 which can be implemented in a database, typically a relational database.
Entity–relationship modeling was developed for database and design by Peter Chen and published in a 1976 paper, with variants of the idea existing previously, but today it is commonly used for teaching students the basics of data base structure. Some ER models show super and subtype entities connected by generalization-specialization relationships, and an ER model can be used also in the specification of domain-specific ontologies.
An ER model is usually the result of systematic analysis to define and describe what data is created and needed by processes in an area of a business. Typically, it represents records of entities and events monitored and directed by business processes, rather than the processes themselves. It is usually drawn in a graphical form as boxes (entities) that are connected by lines (relationships) which express the associations and dependencies between entities. It can also be expressed in a verbal form, for example: one building may be divided into zero or more apartments, but one apartment can only be located in one building.
Entities may be characterized not only by relationships, but also by additional properties (attributes), which include identifiers called "primary keys". Diagrams created to represent attributes as well as entities and relationships may be called entity-attribute-relationship diagrams, rather than entity–relationship models.
An ER model is typically implemented as a database.
Official source
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