Information Modeling and Relational Databases, 2nd Edition

Foreword

by Professor Dr. Sjir Nijssen, CTOPNA Group, The Netherlands

It gives me great personal pleasure to write this foreword. I have known Terry Halpin since 1986. As John Zachman has said about Terry, he is one of those people who is bigger than his reputation and far more humble than his contribution warrants. Terry is one of the most effective and dedicated authors of a new wave in knowledge engineering and requirements specification. I would like to classify ORM (Terry’s focus, called Object-Role Modeling) as a fact orientation approach. This by itself is already much broader than data modeling. It is my professional opinion, based on extensive experience during more than 40 years in business and academia, that fact orientation is the ...