The Early Days of Entity-Relationship Modeling Retrospective on Dataid Project and Beyond

Abstract

This book, dedicated to Ontoni Olivé, will be presented to him at the 36th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling; this tells us that conceptual modeling established as a research field about 40 years ago, when seminal works on conceptual modeling were published. Our research career started as well about 40 years ago, and modeling has been a constant interest for both of us - not limited to data, but also to process abstractions and to various application domains. In 2013, C.B. was recent recipient of the Peter Chen Award for outstanding contributions to conceptual modeling and S.C. recalls calling for three important things in databases: modeling, modeling, modeling when receiving the Edward Codd Award. This paper is a journey over the early years of conceptual modeling, seen from the perspective of two early members of the research community.We will focus on conceptual database design, situated in the more general context of information systems design and of database design.