What is an ERD

According to Biscobing (2023) ERD stands for Entity Relationship Diagram. It is a graphical representation of entities, relationships, attributes and cardinalities present among individuals, things, places, ideas or events inside an information technology (IT) system.

An Entity is a concept or item in the system being defined that is represented on the diagram as a field and contains attributes that characterise it.

A Relationship is a connection between two or more entities, represented as a line connecting fields.

Cardinality describes the number of instances of one entity that can be associated with instances of another entity, such as one-to-one, one-to-many or many-to-many.

An attribute is a characteristic or property describing an entity, listed in the field representing the entity on the diagram.

ERDs are commonly used in database design and software engineering to visualize and arrange comprehensive systems.

Reference

Biscobing, J. (2023) Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD). Available at: https://www.techtarget.com/searchdatamanagement/definition/entity-relationship-diagram-ERD (Accessed: 14 March 2021).