Barker's Notation

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Entity Relationship Diagrams (ERDs) are a way of modelling real-world problems by organising and structuring the data for a particular area of interest. This structured data is called a data model, and uses a visual language to draw objects, their inter-relationships and other relevant properties; ERDs call them entities, relationships and attributes respectively. Several styles of visual language exist for drawing ERDs, one of which is called the Barker notation.

Barker's notation refers to the ERD notation developed by Richard Barker, Ian Palmer, Harry Ellis et al. whilst working at the British consulting firm CACI around 1986. The notation was adopted by Barker when he joined Oracle and is effectively defined in his book Entity Relationship Modelling as part of the CASE Method series of books. This notation was and still is used by the Oracle CASE modelling tools. It is a variation of the "crows foot" style of data modelling that was favoured by many over the original Chen style of ERD modelling because of its readability and efficient use of drawing space.

[edit] See also

• Data modeling

[edit] Further reading

• Richard Barker (1990). CASE Method: Entity Relationship Modelling. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Professional. ISBN 0-201-41696-4.