Metamodeling the Enhanced Entity-Relationship Model

Abstract

A metamodel provides an abstract syntax to distinguish between valid and invalid models. That is, a metamodel is as useful for a modeling language as a grammar is for a programming language. In this context, although the Enhanced Entity-Relationship (EER) Model is the “de facto” standard modeling language for database conceptual design, to the best of our knowledge, there are only two proposals of EER metamodels, which do not provide a full support to Chen’s notation. Furthermore, neither a discussion about the engineering used for specifying these metamodels is presented nor a comparative analysis among them is made. With the aim at overcoming these drawbacks, we show a detailed and practical view of how to formalize the EER Model by means of a metamodel that (i) covers all elements of the Chen’s notation, (ii) defines well-formedness rules needed for creating syntactically correct EER schemas, and (iii) can be used as a starting point to create Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools for EER modeling, interchange metadata among these tools, perform automatic SQL/DDL code generation, and/or extend (or reuse part of) the EER Model. In order to show the feasibility, expressiveness, and usefulness of our metamodel (named EERMM), we have developed a CASE tool (named EERCASE), which has been tested with a practical example that covers all EER constructors, confirming that our metamodel is feasible, useful, more expressive than related ones and correctly defined. Moreover, we analyze our work against the related ones and present our final remarks.