Entity-Relationship semantic meta-model based on ontology

Entity-Relationship ideas are commonly used to characterize and design information systems. They use the entity-relationship diagram to display the objects of the system and relationships among them. But the diagram model is not called in running by the program, at the same time entity-attributes belong to a specific entity and is a local definition. Ontology is defined as an explicit formal specification of a shared conceptualization. It can provide semantic meaning through relations between concepts. The paper mainly discusses the Entity-Relationship relationship with ontology, propose a Entity-Relationship semantic meta-model to solve the problem. With the method, ontology is the basic of semantic on entity-relationship diagram, and may catch the commonness among the entity-relationships in the same domain. Finally we describe the prototype of a tool and how it fits with the development methodology.