Dear colleagues,
as a researcher interested in software engineering you might
be interested in my book on foundations of entity-relationship
modeling which has recently appeared with Springer. The entity-
relationship model is used almost everywhere in software
engineering, sometime even in wrong and inconsistent way, or
relying on the binary entity-relationship model or using error-prone
notions of cardinality constraints etc or using outdated versions of
the model. The entiy-relationship model seems to be a standard in
software engineering and has heavily influenced developments such
as UML. It has often been claimed that there is no theory of the
entity-relationship model of if there are parts and pieces then those
are incomplete, cover only structural aspects. Thus, the ER model
is mainly used as a drawing aid.
The new book covers the research on the entity-relationship model
over the past 20 years and tries also to explore our approaches to
extensions of ER models in order to cover modeling of structures,
functionality, static and dynamic integrity constraints as well as
modeling of interaction. Furthermore - and what is more important -
I have tried to summarize the achievements of conceptual modeling
in a comprehensive survey.
Please visit my webpage on the book. There you will find
information on the book, information on Springer as well material for
teaching and slides of talks which might ease the direct utilization
of the book. This webpage is going to be constantly updated with
new slides.
In the past ER models seem to be limited in the structural aspects
of modeling. This is not true anymore. ER models can cope with all
aspects of information systems specification including functions,
behavior, user interaction, constraint maintenance. I have tried
to summarize this research in a compendium on ER modeling
including all aspects, including proposals for overcoming wrong
modeling approaches.
With best regards,
Bernhard Thalheim
http:// www.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/~thalheim/HERM.htm
______________________________________________________
http://www.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/~thalheim
Phone: +49 355 692700 Fax: +49 355 692766
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