Peter Chen

This article is about the Taiwanese computer scientist. For the US chemist, see Peter Chen (chemist) .

Peter Pin-Shan Chen , Chinese: Chen Pin-Shan ( Chinese  陳 品 山 , Pinyin Chén Pǐnshān , born January 3, 1947 in Taichung , Taiwan ) is a Taiwanese computer scientist who founded Entity Relationship Modeling (ER model) for the 1976 Data analysis developed. With his graphic form of representation of the data and their interrelationships (his Chen notation ), he revolutionized data modeling and opened the door to graphic software development . Chen's ER model is now a central component of many software development methods , CASE tools and data repositories in system analysis and design .

Life

Chen became an electrical engineer at National Taiwan University in 1968 , and in 1970 and 1973 received his Masters and PhDs in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics from Harvard University . 1974–1978 he was an 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 has been a 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 used a lot in software literature today.

His ER model goes back to his 1976 article The Entity Relationship Model - Toward A Unified View of Data . This article is surely one of the most cited articles in the computer world and was voted among the 38 most influential articles in 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) from IBM and the repository of the relational database DB2 (RM / MVS) were based on his model. The DEC CDD + was also based on it. The large CASE tool providers such as Computer Associates (CA) with ERWIN , Oracle with Designer or Sybase with PowerDesigner were influenced by the ER model. Even the drawing program VISIO from Microsoft was affected. The IDEF1X standard was also derived from the ER model.

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

In 2007, Chen received the Mark Weiser Award .

literature

• Chen, Peter Pin-Shan: The Entity-Relationship Model - Toward a Unified View of Data (PDF; 1.7 MB), ACM Transactions on Database Systems 1/1/1976 ACM-Press ISSN  0362-5915 , p. 9 -36
• Chen Peter Pin-Shan: Entity-Relationship Modeling - Historical Events, Future Trends, and Lessons Learned (PDF; 427 kB) in Software Pioneers: Contributions to Software Engineering, Broy M. and Denert, E. (eds.), Springer -Verlag, Berlin, Lecturing Notes in Computer Sciences, June 2002, pp. 100-114, ISBN 3-540-43081-4 .

Web links

• Homepage - Prof. Dr. Peter Chen at Louisiana State University
• Research Papers Online - 1976 article from the ACM Digital Library