Peter Chen

Peter Chen, Chinese Chen Pin- Shan (Chinese陈 品 山, Pinyin Chén Pǐnshān, born January 3, 1947 in Taichung, Taiwan) is a Taiwanese computer scientists, the Entity-Relationship modeling developed in 1976 ( ER model ) for data analysis. With its graphical representation form of the data and their relationships ( his Chen notation), he revolutionized the data modeling and opened the gate for graphical software development. Chen's ER model is now in systems analysis and design in the central part of many software development methods, CASE tools and data repositories.

Life and work

Chen was established in 1968 electrical engineering from the National Taiwan University, in 1970 and 1973, he received his masters and PhD in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. 1974-1978 he was assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. 1978-1984 Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA Management School ). Since 1983 he is professor of computer science (American "Computer Science" ) at Louisiana State University. The terms " entity-relationship model ( ERM) ", " Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD )" or " Chen " notation are widely used in the software literature today.

His ER model walk in his article published in 1976 The Entity Relationship Model - Toward A Unified View of back data. This article is certainly one of the most cited articles in the computer world and was voted among the 38 most influential products of computer science.

Chen's work was a milestone in software engineering and in the development of computer -aided software engineering tools ( CASE tools ). In the late 80s and early 90s, the software tool Application Development Cycle (AD / Cycle ) by IBM and the repository of the relational database DB2 ( RM / MVS ) at its model oriented. Also, the DEC CDD based thereon. The major CASE tool vendors such as Computer Associates (CA ) with ERWIN, Oracle Designer or with Sybase with the PowerDesigner were influenced by the ER model. Even the drawing program VISIO Microsoft was affected. Also the IDEF1X standard was derived from the ER model.

Chen's model was the basis for object-oriented analysis and design methods. The UML modeling language emerged from these developments. Chen has received many awards for his work and is now one of the pioneers of computer science.