Entity–relationship model
Model or diagram describing interrelated things / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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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).
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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,[1] 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 and design by Peter Chen and published in a 1976 paper,[2] with variants of the idea existing previously.[3] Today it is commonly used for teaching students the basics of database structure. Some ER models show super and subtype entities connected by generalization-specialization relationships,[4] and an ER model can also be used to specify domain-specific ontologies.