This site features a number of technical papers and articles on ORM, as
well as other approaches such as the Unified Modeling Language (UML).
Permission has been obtained from the relevant publishers to reproduce
these publications on this website, and to make them freely downloadable.
If you are unfamiliar with ORM, you may want to first review the ORM in Detail section of this
site. Details about upcoming courses and conferences, as well as links to
websites with additional ORM publications may be found in the Resources section.
The editor
Dr. Terry Halpin,
Distinguished Professor and Vice President of Conceptual Modeling at Neumont University, Utah, formalized
the Object Role Modeling notation and has authored five books and over 150
technical papers. Visit the rest of this site to explore various
conceptual data modeling topics discussed in his publications.
Information on this site will grow with time, so please revisit.
If you have any feedback or suggestions, please e-mail me at thalpin@comcast.net.
Happy reading!
Terry Last updated: 2008 March 2 NORMA (Neumont ORM Architect) is a new modeling tool under
development that supports the next generation of ORM (ORM 2). Implemented
as an open-source plug-in to Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET, NORMA
requires at least the standard version of Visual Studio (2005 or 2008). For further
details on the ORM 2 graphical notation, see ORM 2 Technical Report
1. A technical preview of NORMA is available on The ORM Foundation as well as SourceForge. Here is an ORM Foundation link to NORMA, and here is a SourceForge link to NORMA.
The DAMA International Symposium 2008 held in San Diego on March 16-20, 2008, included a tutorial on ORM by Dr. Gordon Everest as well as a session on temporal data modeling by Dr. Terry Halpin.
An International Workshop on ORM will be held in Monterrey, Mexico on
November 12-14, 2008, in conjunction with the On The Move federated
conferences. For further details, see the ORM2008 Workshop Call For Papers.
Added five Business Rules Journal articles (Resources page).
Added five workshop papers (Modeling Issues page).
Recent Updates log:
Object Role Modeling (ORM) is a
powerful method for designing and querying database models at the
conceptual level, where the application is described in terms easily
understood by non-technical users. In practice, ORM data models often
capture more business rules, and are easier to validate and evolve than
data models in other approaches.
Thanks for dropping in to the
Object Role Modeling web site. In addition to the technical papers
on Object Role Modeling and other modeling approaches, you can find
details about my book, Information Modeling and Relational
Databases, information about other resources, and interviews
with the press.
To view a PDF file you need to
install an additional piece of software called Adobe
Acrobat Reader from the Adobe site.
The 2nd edition of Information Modeling and Relational Databases (ISBN: 978-0-12-373568-3) was published on March 1, 2008. This major upgrade of the earlier edition runs to 970 pages and includes loads of new and updated content. Fully updated to ORM 2 and UML 2 and the latest developments in SQL and XML, this book reveals the true power of semantic data modeling (covering ORM, ER, and UML), as well as addressing business process modeling, relational databases, and other modeling topics such as the semantic web. Here is a link to the book on Amazon.
The NORMA software is currently in the pre-beta stage, but extensive functionality enhancements and
user-interface improvements are planned for the near future. Currently the
tool supports entry of ORM2 schemas, verbalization of of most constraints,
and code generation (for basic constraints) to a variety of DBMSs
(including SQL Server, DB2, Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL) as well as class
models and XML schema. NORMA is capable of importing ORM schemas entered
in Visio for Enterpise Architects, but the diagrams need to be laid out
manually. For Part 1 of the specification for automated verbalization in NORMA, see ORM 2 Technical Report 2.
2008 March 2: Added six workshop papers (Modeling Issues page).
2008 March 1: Added details of second edition of main book, ORM Foundation links, updated conference details, and six Business Rules Journal articles.
2006 July 30: Added paper on Business Rule Modality (Modeling Issues page), and link to second NORMA Technical report (this page).
ORM Home ORM in Detail Modeling Issues
Conceptual Queries UML and ORM Resources
All diagrams on this site were created with Microsoft Visio.