Dr. Peter Pin-Shan Chen (Chinese: 陳品山) is an American computer scientist and Professor of Computer Science at Louisiana State University, who is known for the development of Entity-Relationship Modeling in 1976.
Dr. Peter Chen's original paper is commonly cited as the definitive reference for Entity Relationship Modelling.
Chen did not in fact invent the concept; the basic ideas appear in earlier papers especially by practitioners, such as that by A. P. G. Brown.
However, Chen did more than anyone to formalize and popularize the model, and to introduce it to the academic literature.
- The box represents an entity.
- A diamond symbol represents a type of relationship.
- Circles represent the attributes of an entity.
- The double-box represents a weak entity, which is dependent on its parent entity.
- Relationship adornments are added adjacent to the lines to indicate connectivity (I, M, N) and cardinality.