Data Model - History

History

One of the earliest pioneering works in modelling information systems was done by Young and Kent (1958), who argued for "a precise and abstract way of specifying the informational and time characteristics of a data processing problem". They wanted to create "a notation that should enable the analyst to organize the problem around any piece of hardware". Their work was a first effort to create an abstract specification and invariant basis for designing different alternative implementations using different hardware components. A next step in IS modelling was taken by CODASYL, an IT industry consortium formed in 1959, who essentially aimed at the same thing as Young and Kent: the development of "a proper structure for machine independent problem definition language, at the system level of data processing". This led to the development of a specific IS information algebra.

In the 1960s data modeling gained more significance with the initiation of the management information system (MIS) concept. According to Leondes (2002), "during that time, the information system provided the data and information for management purposes. The first generation database system, called Integrated Data Store (IDS), was designed by Charles Bachman at General Electric. Two famous database models, the network data model and the hierarchical data model, were proposed during this period of time". Towards the end of the 1960s Edgar F. Codd worked out his theories of data arrangement, and proposed the relational model for database management based on first-order predicate logic.

In the 1970s entity relationship modeling emerged as a new type of conceptual data modeling, originally proposed in 1976 by Peter Chen. Entity relationship models were being used in the first stage of information system design during the requirements analysis to describe information needs or the type of information that is to be stored in a database. This technique can describe any ontology, i.e., an overview and classification of concepts and their relationships, for a certain area of interest.

In the 1970s G.M. Nijssen developed "Natural Language Information Analysis Method" (NIAM) method, and developed this in the 1980s in cooperation with Terry Halpin into Object-Role Modeling (ORM).

Further in the 1980s according to Jan L. Harrington (2000) "the development of the object-oriented paradigm brought about a fundamental change in the way we look at data and the procedures that operate on data. Traditionally, data and procedures have been stored separately: the data and their relationship in a database, the procedures in an application program. Object orientation, however, combined an entity's procedure with its data."