The Enhanced Entity-Relationship (EER) Model

Chapter 8

The Enhanced Entity-Relationship (EER) Model

_The ER modeling concepts discussed in Chapter 7 are  sufficient  for  representing  many  database schemas for traditional database applications, which include many data-processing applications in business and industry. Since the late 1970s, however, designers of database applications have tried to design more accurate database schemas that reflect the data properties and constraints more precisely. This was particularly important for newer applications of database technology, such as databases for engineering design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM), telecommunications, complex software systems, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS), among many other applications. These types of databases have more complex requirements than do the more traditional applications. This led to the development of additional semantic data modeling concepts that were incorporated into conceptual data models such as the ER model. Various semantic data models have been proposed in the literature. Many of these concepts were also developed independently in related areas of computer science, such as the knowledge representation area of artificial intelligence and the object modeling area in software engineering.

In this chapter, we describe features that have been proposed for semantic data models, and show how the ER model can be enhanced to include these concepts, leading to the Enhanced ER (EER) model. We start in Section 8.1 by incorporating the concepts of class/subclass relationships and type inheritance into the ER model. Then, in Section 8.2, we add the concepts of specialization and generalization. Section 8.3 discusses the various types of constraints on specialization/generalization, and Section 8.4 shows how the UNION construct can be modeled by including the concept of category in the EER model. Section 8.5 gives a sample UNIVERSITY database schema in the EER model and summarizes the EER model concepts by giving formal definitions. We will use the terms object and entity interchangeably in this chapter, because many of these concepts are commonly used in object-oriented models.

We present the UML class diagram notation for representing specialization and generalization in Section 8.6, and briefly compare these with EER notation and concepts. This serves as an example of alternative notation, and is a continuation of Section 7.8, which presented basic UML class diagram notation that corresponds to the basic ER model. In Section 8.7, we discuss the fundamental abstractions that are used as the basis of many semantic data models. Section 8.8 summarizes the chapter.

For a detailed introduction to conceptual modeling, Chapter 8 should be considered a continuation of Chapter 7. However, if only a basic introduction to ER modeling is desired, this chapter may be omitted. Alternatively, the reader may choose to skip some or all of the later sections of this chapter (Sections 8.4 through 8.8).