Requirements Analysis: From Business Views to Architecture

Appendix B. A Comparison of Data Modeling Techniques(Syntactic Conventions)

Peter Chen first introduced entity/relationship modeling in 1976 [Chen 1976, 1977]. It was a brilliant idea that has revolutionized the way we represent data. It was a first version only, however, and many people since then have made improvements on it. A veritable plethora of data-modeling techniques have been developed.

Things became more complicated in the late 1980s with the advent of a variation on this theme called “object modeling”. Now there were even more ways to model the structure of data. This was mitigated somewhat in the mid-1990s with the introduction of the UML, a modeling technique intended to replace at least all the “object-modeling” ones. As will be ...