Evolution of entity-relationship modelling

Abstract

New modelling languages are continually being developed. Some of them are variants of existing ones, others are completely different, and a few become widely accepted. The overall variety of modelling languages can be explained by an evolutionary process that exhibits regularities. Evolution has been studied extensively in biology and linguistics. From the results of these studies, hypotheses on the causes, mechanisms and directions of the evolution of entity-relationship (ER) modelling are derived and tested, using a sample of 100 ER models. The empirical results lead to theory of the evolution of modelling languages. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.