The entity-relationship model: toward a unified view of data

The paper proposes the entity-relationship model, a data model that incorporates the semantic information of the real world by representing it in terms of entities and the relationships between them. To make these structures explicit, it introduces a special diagrammatic technique for exhibiting entities and relationships, and it demonstrates the approach with a worked example of database design and description using both the model and the diagrams.

By capturing real-world semantics, the model aims toward a unified view of data that can bridge different ways of organizing and using information. The author discusses the model's implications for data integrity, information retrieval, and data manipulation, laying conceptual foundations that became broadly influential for database design and modeling.