Peter Chen’s paper “Entity-Relationship: a unified view of data” is turning 50 years old!

In the middle of the database wars in the 70s, Peter wrote a long-lasting classic contribution: a natural-language inspired minimalistic model to capture domain concepts in a way that was independent of technology.  Peter’s paper even had the foresight of prescribing levels going from knowledge about the world to computational independent data models, platform independent and platform specific models (his levels 0-3).

As a tribute, a panel with conceptual modelers belonging to several generations and active over these 50 years was convened at the 45th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, 5-8 October 2026, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada.

The panel included Terry Halpin (creator of the ORM language and 2026 Peter Chen Award Laureate), Sudha Ram (2021 Peter Chen Award Laureate), Oscar Pastor (2016 Peter Award Laureate), CIRES Centre Director Shazia Sadiq, Roman L., Simon Curty (2026 David Gries Awardee for contributions to Conceptual Modeling and Programming), Giancarlo Guizzardi, and, of course, the one and only Peter Chen (unfortunately, joining remotely).

Shazia says: “A privilege to have the opportunity to speak alongside such distinguished scholars to pay tribute to Peter and celebrate 50 years of impact of the ER diagram.”